Yes, Week 1 sucked in a lot of ways. Not, the season isn’t lost after just one game. The time between Week 1 and Week 2 is prime for overreactions based on faulty first impressions. That said, this is the second time in the two years that Dave Canales has been working with Bryce Young and the Carolina Panthers that both the quarterback and the team as a whole have opened the season looking flat.

I. for one. retain some optimism for the season, but you don’t have to spend long in either the first or second half game threads...

For all the talk about getting off to a hot start in Week 1, Head coach Dave Canales two attempts can both properly be described as complete failures. Watching the game on Sunday felt like Bill Murray waking up to “I got you babe” in Groundhog Day – that is, it felt like nothing had changed.

While in some cases that is certainly true, in others the team did show some more signs of optimism that certainly weren’t present after the first 60 minutes of Week 1 in 2024.

Same: Young’s stats

Young’s Week 1 2024: 13/30, 161...

Hello CSR! Welcome to Brian Asks, your weekly Panthers fan mailbag for everyone! Many of our questions last week centered around how the result of week 1 would impact the Panthers season. We tried to be optimistic, but unfortunately the Panthers followed suit from the last 7 or so seasons and really got their butts kicked in week 1, prompting many strong reactions. As someone who has been with this website for well over 10 years now, I totally understand the frustration, and hopefully this little weekly forum we’ve been cultivating since last year will give you a place to...

It certainly would have been been a pleasant break from tradition for the Carolina Panthers to open their first game of the season with some high-flying action on offense and a brick wall of a defense. Unfortunately, fans were yet again subjected to another sloppy performance loaded with miscues and ‘almosts’ in Week One.

The lopsided score certainly tells one story, one that would lead any rational observer to believe that the Jacksonville Jaguars were far and away the better football team on Sunday afternoon. On a second viewing, maybe even the third, after the sting of disappointment from losing...

The 0-1 Carolina Panthers open as underdogs against the 1-0 Arizona Cardinals. Arizona is fresh off of beating the New Orleans Saints by one touchdown in a 20-13 Week 1 win, while the Panthers are coming from whatever it is they claim to have been doing down in Jacksonville last week.

The odds are not kind to the Panthers and they should not be expected to be. They will be underdogs in every game this season, save perhaps against the Miami Dolphins, until they pull multiple and consecutive upsets.

Week 2

Spread

Panthers: +6.5 (-105)

Cardinals: -6.5 (-115)...

There is no sugar coating how much yesterday’s 26-10 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars sucked. The Carolina Panthers have been going downhill for about the past eight years and a season opening stinker is all too familiar. The defense looking lost on the field is too familiar. Bryce Young struggling in a season opener? Yup, we’ve seen that a few too many times. It’s the familiarity of this kind of bad, the frequency with which we’ve seen it, that hurts the most. It took all that optimism we had coming into the season and soured it with a nauseating quickness....

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Summary

Well, sloppy football begat a disappointing result in the season opener once again. Young was somewhere in between where he opened and where he finished the 2024 season. Whether this is his starting point or high water mark for 2025 remains to be seen.

The Panthers defense was equally as unimpressive. They came up big on a few plays and gave up many more big plays. Their pass rush, run defense, linebackers, and secondary play all left a lot to be desired on almost every play. It was, in short, not a good look.

What worked yesterday was...

Down 20-3 at that half, the Panthers will hopefully show up less sloppy to finish the game.

This is your open thread to follow along with all the action today.

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It’s here, y’all. Live Carolina Panthers football kicks off today.

This is your open thread to follow along with all the action tonight.

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It’s game day! There are zero days left until the start of the Carolina Panthers 2025 schedule, so today’s countdown piece is about number 0 in your program, tight end Ja’Tavion Sanders.

Editor’s note: That means the game is today, y’all, in case you’ve missed the entire point of this series.

Before the Panthers

The 6-foot-4, 252-pound tight end spent three college seasons with the Texas Longhorns before declaring for the 2024 NFL draft following his junior year. As a freshman in 2021 he appeared in 12 games, primarily playing special teams, without recording any offensive stats. In his 2022...

Y’all, I’m nervous. Dave Canales and Bryce Young seem like the real deal. They could be a winning combination of leaders for the Carolina Panthers both tomorrow and for years to come. But we’ve thought that before about some of our previous combinations of head coaches and quarterbacks. Some of those quarterbacks have gone on to greater successes elsewhere. That’s less true of the head coaches. What those coaches—and general managers past—have done is leave a legacy imprinted deep in the Panthers roster of poor free agency decisions and even poorer drafting. It has been a legacy of losing that...