Caleb Harris
CHARLOTTE, NC – If ever there was a reminder that the Carolina Panthers brand is not what it once was, the release of the 2024 NFL Schedule made it explicitly clear where the franchise currently stands: After years of instability and an NFL-worst 2–15 record in 2023, the Panthers were the only National Football League team not to host a single primetime game when their schedule was revealed a week ago.
Although the Panthers have five games scheduled for the 4 p.m. ET window — and the Week 10 game in Munich against the New York Giants will be a NFL 9:30am Standalone Network – Most of their games this upcoming season will take place in the 1pm ET window, putting them relatively out of sight and out of mind in the grand scheme of things. NFL landscape. For those most loyal to the Panthers and for those who remember and experienced their glory days, such contempt was a hard pill to swallow: the greatest rusher of all time and Carolina franchise great, Jonathan Stewart, criticized the lack of a cousin of your team. time game, saying on a podcast that current staff should feel disrespected and that he would use this as motivation as a player.
On the Panthers’ first day of OTAs on Monday, quarterback Bryce Young — a player accustomed to the spotlight as a star at Alabama and the No. 1 overall pick in 2023 NFL Draft – was asked if he considered his team not getting a primetime game a slap in the face.
“It’s out of our control. I love just focusing on us — focusing on what I can control,” Young said. “I’m not very good at trying to find external motivation in something else. I’m not really into, ‘Oh, if someone despises me or us, I want to hold on to that.’ And there is nothing wrong with that, everyone gets their fire and fuel from certain places. For me, I just try to be internally motivated and strive to be the best I can be, I want us to be the best we can be. my view on everything.
“Obviously it is what it is. I get it, I understand what it is. Now it’s up to us to do what we need to do.”
Unfortunately, it’s hard to argue with the planners’ reasoning for keeping the Panthers out of the national spotlight: Since David Tepper purchased the team in 2018, the Panthers have gone 31-68 and have gone through five different coaches, including three on an interim basis, since being fired from the winningest coach of all time, Ron Rivera, at the end of the 2019 season.
First-year head coach Dave Canales, who is now the sixth head coach after Rivera, is the franchise’s last hope of finding stability and a path back to the heights they reached over the past decade. When asked about his team being overlooked since prime time, Canales gave a very grounded and honest answer about what it takes to be thrust into the spotlight.
“You have to win. You have to win prime time games,” Canales said. “These things don’t just happen. Every year you don’t start like this – they don’t throw you into prime time games for no reason. We have to build something, a version of football that we are proud of and be able to accentuate the strengths and talents of our boys.
“And so, I think the world is going to want to see that at some point. But we have a long way to go and we need to earn these types of opportunities.”
When asked about using the primetime snub as motivation for Panthers players, Canales emphasized that it is not a “negative motivator” and instead chooses to focus on the possibilities. He left the possibility of players being individually motivated by not having primetime games, but the team’s lack of star power relative to the rest of the league is part of the problem.
The Panthers have gradually lost the top-end talent they’ve had in recent seasons, a trend that continued this offseason when star pass rusher Brian Burns was traded to the New York Giants. Currently, defensive tackle Derrick Brown is the only member of the team’s homegrown core to have made a Pro Bowl, having done so for the first time last season.
