How To Fix The Carolina Panthers

I started writing this article last week after Carolina benched former No. 1 overall pick Bryce Young and before veteran QB Andy Dalton legitimately had one of the best quarterback performances of the 2024 season in Week 3 against the Raiders. Had I known that the answer to this question was simply “Start the Red Rifle,” I’d have saved myself a ton of time. 

Unfortunately I’ve been following the Panthers for too long to take Sunday for anything other than a really fun day. Dalton is who he is at this point — a soon-to-be 37-year-old quarterback with a career 84-78-2 record. He might make the season more watchable and lead Carolina to six or seven wins, but he’s not the franchise savior. 

Significant problems with this franchise remain. There’s not much talent on the roster, which is already one of the oldest in the league. Panthers DT Derrick Brown is arguably their only blue-chip player and he’s on injured reserve. The future of the quarterback position is still up in the air. And owner Dave Tepper is widely considered the worst owner in football. 

That last problem is the most significant and the hardest to overcome. Organizations are only as good as the people at the top, and owners can’t be cut or fired. They can only learn — and as you can imagine that’s a slow process for billionaires who assume their immense wealth makes them the smartest person in every room. 

There have been no shortage of learning moments for Tepper since he bought the team in 2018. If there’s a silver lining for fans, it’s that Tepper seems to legitimately want to win and that’s not necessarily a given in the ranks of NFL ownership. If anything, he cares too much. 

Turning this organization around will depend on Tepper learning from two key mistakes that have defined his tenure so far. There’s plenty more to do to get the Panthers back to relevancy but without these two changes, Carolina will continue to be the laughingstock of the league. 

Too Much Emphasis On Finding A Quarterback?

From the moment Tepper took over the team he has been obsessed with finding a franchise quarterback, rightfully observing the teams with the best quarterbacks tended to win Super Bowls most of the time. But while it’s true quarterback is the most important position on the field, Carolina has become the latest textbook example of why the support system around the quarterback matters a ton as well. 

You can see that by how passers who played miserably in Carolina in recent years like Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold are currently thriving in better ecosystems with the Buccaneers and Vikings respectively. The only offensive coordinator with any semblance of success in the past six years, Joe Brady, was fired midway through his second season and is now calling plays for one of the league’s top offenses in Buffalo. 

The complete failure of Carolina’s supporting cast on every level, from coaching to protection to skill position impotency, gave Young no chance in his rookie season. Sunday’s explosion proved the supporting cast is better this year and Young bears a lot of responsibility for his continued struggles, but it’s up for debate how much better things truly are. The Panthers are one of the oldest teams in the NFL and not because they’re stacking up for a playoff run. There’s been a consistent drain of talent since the heyday of the franchise in the mid-2010s, and the Panthers had to be active in free agency this past offseason to compensate for a series of poor draft classes. Just 40 percent of the current roster was drafted by the team, the lowest mark of all 32 teams. 

On the rare occasion the Panthers landed a blue-chip player in the draft, they’ve traded those players away. 

• The team traded RB Christian McCaffrey at the deadline in 2022 in order to accumulate picks to go after a quarterback, getting a second, third, fourth and fifth-round pick. The assumption was McCaffrey as a running back with a serious injury history was unlikely to still be a difference-maker by the time Carolina was ready to compete. 
• The Panthers still needed to trade WR D.J. Moore, a future first and a future second to move up to No. 1 for Young. 
• Carolina turned down another offer at the deadline in 2022 from the Rams for OLB Brian Burns that would have been at least two first-round picks, then chose to trade Moore instead of Burns to get Young. Burns’ asking price consequentially went up and the Panthers got cold feet. Instead of extending him, the Panthers traded him for a second-round pick and some change this past offseason. 

There are a lot of moving parts including all the trades later involved with those picks but to recap in the simplest terms, the Panthers traded McCaffrey, Moore and Burns and got Young, OLB D.J. Johnson, RB Jonathon Brooks and a 2025 5th. That’s not counting the opportunity cost of giving up the pick that was used on QB Caleb Williams, or not getting two first-rounders for Burns. Brooks could be a nice player and the book isn’t completely written on Young yet. But that’s about as positive of a spin as I can put on that outcome…

To sum it all up: 

• The Panthers have invested too many resources with little payoff in fixing the quarterback position, impacting their ability to build the rest of the roster. 
• With the draft picks they have used, the Panthers have too high of a miss rate, suggesting a failure in the evaluation process. 
• The number of ex-Panthers players who have gone on to have success elsewhere in the past several years also points to deeper issues, both with how players are developed and a disconnect between the front office and coaching staff on how players fit into the system. 

Patience — Or A Lack Thereof

Tepper isn’t the one scouting players or trading all the Panthers’ stars. But his influence in the organization is impossible to ignore, particularly in one way related to all the issues laid out in the previous section. Tepper is not a patient person. Despite telling fans “Rome wasn’t built in a day” during one of his first press conferences, the defining feature of the Tepper era — besides the dysfunction and the losing — has been the inability to stick with a consistent vision for longer than a season. 

• 2020: After moving on from Ron Rivera near the end of the previous season, Tepper hired then-Baylor HC Matt Rhule early in the interview process to pair with holdover GM Marty Hurney. They cut QB Cam Newton and signed veteran QB Teddy Bridgewater to take the first crack at replacing him. It was a significant contract but also middle of the market for the position at the time. 
• 2021: After going 5-11, the Panthers dumped Bridgewater after just one year to chase higher upside options. They also moved on from Hurney and paired Rhule with GM Scott Fitterer, and the two masterminded a trade for Darnold. Despite a hot start, Darnold started trending down and then was injured, leading to the team bringing back Newton for the stretch run. Rhule fired Brady during the bye in Week 13 and Carolina went from 5-5 to 5-12.
• 2022: Rhule and Fitterer hired OC Ben McAdoo to replace Brady, the best coordinator candidate they could get since Rhule was viewed as a lame duck. They traded for Mayfield to compete with (replace) Darnold. Rhule was fired after a 1-4 start and the team was turned over to interim HC Steve Wilks. Mayfield, Darnold and P.J. Walker all started about a third of the season each, with Mayfield getting cut mid-season. The team went 6-6 with Wilks to finish 7-10. 
• 2023: Tepper elected to hire Frank Reich as head coach instead of retaining Wilks because he wanted a coach with a background on offense. They stacked up an “all-star” coaching staff and traded the farm to go get Young. Reich was fired after just 11 games, an NFL record for brevity, and the Panthers finished 2-15. 
• 2024: Fired Fitterer but replaced him internally by promoting assistant GM Dan Morgan. Hired new HC Dave Canales, formerly the OC with the Buccaneers and Mayfield and the QB coach of the Seahawks for a decade before that. Benched Young after just two games. 

Carolina has not gone a single season with the same trio of head coach, GM and quarterback. This is the kind of instability that causes organizations to consistently lose games, even if the merits of each situation individually can be debated. It’s hard to criticize benching Young with how well Week 3 turned out, and it looks like the Panthers were correct in their assessment that continuing to start him would do more harm than good. I also doubt Wilks would have been a panacea for all of the problems over the past two seasons. 

But when Tepper rewrote the rebuilding plan by canning Bridgewater and Hurney after just one year, he landed the team on a wheel of dysfunction that became hard to escape. It put all the key figures in the organization on mismatched timelines. Rather than start everyone out on a clean slate and on the same page, Tepper has shuffled pieces in and out looking for a quick fix. He’s created an environment that makes it more difficult for the coaching staff and front office to be aligned and build a cohesive supporting cast for the quarterback and the offense to thrive. The harder Tepper pushes, casting about and reaching for the next shiny thing, the more he undermines the ability of his organization to find players and coaches who can be difference-makers. 

Breaking The Wheel

The Panthers have to find a way to stop spinning the wheel of instability and dysfunction and resist the allure of chasing a quick fix to their mistakes over the past six years. Patience has to be the name of the game and it needs to apply to the whole organization.

Even if Carolina claws its way to a semi-respectable result this year, significant changes are coming in 2025 with all the aging players and expiring contracts on the team. Here’s a list of current starters younger than 27 who are under contract in 2025, not including Brown since he’s on IR: 

• WR Jonathan Mingo
• LT Ikem Ekwonu
• CB Jaycee Horn

That’s it. Morgan and Canales must draft and develop better than their predecessors because this roster needs a ton of work. Trading down and accumulating picks instead of moving up needs to be the priority, which the team got away from in the past couple of years. They did a good job taking the pick they got from Burns and trading down with the Rams to recoup a second-rounder in 2025 after trading their own second for Young. Tepper needs to empower them to do more of that. 

The Panthers will have to be active to some degree in free agency to fill out the roster but should avoid repeating the mistake Fitterer did heading into the 2023 season when he signed a bushel of middle-tier free agents with deals that included guaranteed money in the second season. Morgan ended up cutting most of those players and as a result the Panthers are carrying over $50 million in dead money this season. It’s not always practical in free agency, but as much as possible the Panthers should look for players in their 20s who could develop into key starters or role players with a better system fit — basically doing what other teams have been doing with Panthers free agents the past few years. 

The hardest and most important area the Panthers need to stay patient with is quarterback. A big trade for a veteran or rookie is out of the question with how depleted the roster is, and even if the Panthers drafted a replacement this coming year for Young it’s fair to question if the environment will be conducive to his success (remember how old this team is and how much roster turnover there will be in 2025). Carolina should focus on rebuilding the roster and establishing an identity as a team before getting desperate for a quarterback again. 

That’s of course easier said than done, especially for Tepper. While there are several examples of desperation sinking teams when it comes to pursuing a quarterback, the more measured way isn’t necessarily easier. The Raiders are starting Gardner Minshew after striking out this offseason. Tepper has to have the fortitude to weather a year like Bridgewater put up in 2020 — which in hindsight is the high point of Tepper’s tenure. 

The Panthers could go about this in a variety of ways, many of them dependent on how the final 14 games of the season shake out between Dalton and Young. I’m sure Carolina’s dream scenario is Young getting another shot, whether by injury or by earning his way back to the field, and finally looking like the player they thought they were drafting at No. 1. More than likely, the Panthers will have a different starter in 2025 yet again, and while Young is under contract for two more years, a trade during the offseason is a real possibility. 

No matter what the Panthers do, though, they should take the philosophical approach of building up the rest of the roster and not over-extending for a quarterback again. The Lions should be the model to follow, with the understanding that Carolina might be a year away from even where Detroit was when it started its rebuild under HC Dan Campbell and GM Brad Holmes. But the takeaway is that the Lions let a quarterback come to them and built up the team around him, stayed the course through rough patches, and were rewarded. 

The Downside

The narrative surrounding the Panthers entering this season was that the bar was set so low there was nowhere to go but up. The first two games should serve as a sobering reminder of this NFL truth. 

It can always get worse. 

Right now the Panthers are in one of the worst dry spells of any organization since Tepper took over. But if the owner doesn’t learn from his mistakes, there’s still room to sink even lower. They could keep spinning the slot machine at quarterback, hoping for a breakthrough. Tepper could lose his patience with Morgan after the season, then put Canales in a shotgun marriage with another GM that’s destined to crumble when adversity hits again. They could repeat the same cycle they have in the last seven years again and again and again and again. 

Unless the Panthers find a way to break the wheel, they are in danger of becoming the next hapless organization with struggles that last decades even in a league designed to engineer parity. Teams like the Raiders, the Lions (up until recently) — even the “Factory of Sadness” Browns. 

Unless Tepper learns from his mistakes, it can and will get worse.