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Bryce Young isn't the Panthers' problem.
Carolina ranks 31st of 32 in pass block win rate.
Young has been pressured on 44.3% of his dropbacks against four or fewer pass rushers. Highest rate of any QB in the NFL. That's five blockers losing to four rushers.
He's faced 64 pressures this season. Second-most in the league.
The sacks are charted to the line. Fortner: 4 allowed. Lewis: 4. Hunt beaten cleanly in Week 7.
And through five games, behind all of that, Young was top-10 in efficiency per play, averaged 9.4 air yards per throw, led the NFL in 10+ yard completions, and set a franchise record with 11 TD passes.
Quarterbacks who are the problem don't do that.
What changed is medical. He hurt his knee in Week 3 and has played in a brace since. His pressure-to-sack rate is 17.3% on the season against an 18.4% career mark. The last two weeks: 35.7% and 27.3%.
The escaping stopped. The pressure never did.
Taylor Moton played seven quarters all year and is done for the season. Ekwonu is out after knee surgery. Carolina's tackles are a rookie and a free agent signing.
Put any QB back there and he gets hit.
Firing Ejiro Evero was the right call, and the reason has very little to do with the loss to Green Bay or Tampa.
Over his 4 years in Carolina the Panthers finished 4th in the league in passing yards allowed and last in rushing yards allowed, and those two rankings held season after season because they both came out of the same approach.
Evero kept two safeties deep and played with fewer bodies near the line of scrimmage, which took away deep throws and gave up the run in exchange.
Opposing offenses figured that out quickly and never stopped running at it, and his defenses allowed 200 or more rushing yards in 12 different games since 2024 while the scheme stayed roughly the same.
The season that kept him employed was 2023, when the defense finished 4th in total yards and got him head coaching interviews in 3 cities.
That same unit finished 29th in points on a team that went 2-15.
When an opponent goes up three scores in the second half it stops throwing and starts running clock, and the yardage totals that come out of those games make a defense look better than it played.
Every team that interviewed him that winter hired someone else, and I suspect they were looking at the same gap.
What makes this defensible rather than reactionary is the timeline.
Dan Morgan extended Evero through 2027 in January on the strength of the 2025 defense, which finished 16th in yards and 20th against the run with Derrick Brown healthy for the full season.
Carolina is back to giving up 150 rushing yards a game this year, and the most plausible explanation is that the 2025 improvement had more to do with Brown's availability than with anything Evero changed.
Canales was defending the scheme a week ago and fired him anyway.
Teams do not move on from a coordinator in October unless they have concluded they got the evaluation wrong.
A few observations…
1. Canales has one more season to prove he can win, and win in January.
2. This team has exactly one identity player, the guy who sets the tone for everyone else, and it's Chuba Hubbard. That's a problem.
3. The Evero firing is the real test. Either the locker room is bought into Canales or it isn't, and we're about to find out which.
4. Do they handle it in house, or does it leak? Watch that.
5. The defense has no leader right now. One could still emerge, but nobody has claimed it.
6. Execution and intensity are coaching problems until a player makes them his.
Evero had one good year, one historically bad year, one respectable year, then regression with the most expensive defensive roster he ever had.
He got an extension and was publicly backed after 2025, and the 2026 defense was supposed to be the payoff for the spending.
It was not.
That is why he is gone in October rather than January.
Thankfully, the Fangio style defense for the Panthers ends after this season.
If Dan Quinn gets fired by the Commanders, he would be my first call.
I wouldn’t mind bringing back Sean McDermott but doubt he would take the job.
One positive takeaway I’d mention, is this didn’t leak to the media. I appreciate how much the organization keeps internal happenings internal.
The #Panthers officially fired DC Ejiro Evero and defensive passing game coordinator Jonathan Cooley.
DL coach Todd Wash has been named interim defensive coordinator and will call the defensive plays.
27 of the 47 who played were Day 3 picks or undrafted, 57% of the roster.
A roster dependent on Day 3 and undrafted players has no margin when the top of it gets hurt.
Carolina is 3-4 with its top three corners on IR, and the drop from starter to replacement is steeper here than almost anywhere in the league.
Hey @dpshow a broken rib doesn't cause you to cough up blood. If it's happening, it usually means something beyond the fracture…. a bruised or lacerated lung.
Carolina over-allocated resources to stopping the run against an offense that had no intention of running because they are the league's worst rushing team.
The Panthers are not an unusually injured team.
Over the last six seasons they sit right at league average for time lost to injured reserve, 18th out of 32. If you've heard that injuries are what's wrong in Carolina, the data doesn't back it.
What they do unusually is use IR as a roster tool.
Since 2022 every team gets eight slots to bring players back off IR mid-season. Carolina uses more of them than almost anyone, second only to Dallas. So instead of IR being where seasons go to die, for Carolina it's a way to stash someone for a month, free up a roster spot, and get him back. You can read that two ways: either the front office is squeezing real value out of a rule most teams underuse, or the roster is thin enough that they're constantly shuffling bodies. The data can't tell you which.
The year-to-year swing is enormous and gets flattened by averages.
2023 and 2024 were genuinely bad. 2025 was one of the healthiest seasons in the league. Any "Panthers injury history" take built on a multi-year average is hiding that.
Volume is the wrong way to measure the pain.
2024 was dominated by one injury, Derrick Brown going down in Week 1. And in 2025 Carolina lost very few weeks overall, but the weeks they lost were expensive ones, hitting players they'd paid starter money. Tenth-costliest in the league per week lost, despite being near the bottom in weeks. A handful of injuries to the right players matters more than a long list of injuries to backups.
Sorry to my Panthers. You aren’t beating a Wisconsin team tonight. Too much mojo in the air after the Brewers win their first World Series.
Michael Hernández retweeted
Greatest regular season home run of the 80s? It might be this one right here.