The fact that the Carolina Panthers have won five games this year is a credit to their desire to win – because they have an inordinate number of major flaws for a .500 team.
Defensively, the Panthers have one of the worst pass rushes in the league – and their coverage has fallen off pretty bad at cornerback compared to last season.
Offensively, there are too many problems to name, but the biggest one seems to be that they only really have one and a half reliable weapons.
One of those is breakout superstar running back Rico Dowdle, but as we saw in Sunday’s loss to New Orleans there’s only so much even he can do when a defense is determined to stop him and make Bryce Young beat them.
The half is represented by rookie wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan, who is basically Carolina’s entire passing game. Going into Week 10 he has nearly 100 receiving yards more than every other pass-catcher on the team combined.
That’s a big problem – especially because McMillan has been far less impactful in the second half of games compared to the first. Here’s Mike Kaye from the Charlotte Observer breaking down those painful splits for McMillan.
“In the first half of the first 10 games of the season, McMillan was targeted 46 times for 30 catches for 417 yards and a touchdown. That’s a 65% completion rate with a 13.9 yards-per-catch average… In the second half of games, McMillan was targeted 31 times for 16 catches for 201 yards and a touchdown. That’s 12.6 yards per catch on a 51.6% catch rate.”
You really can’t blame McMillan for this. After all, he is only a rookie.
Canales himself has to be more creative drawing up McMillan’s route tree, which consists mostly of verticals, a couple of in-breakers and not a whole lot else.
More importantly, the Panthers’ other receiving weapons have to come to life and start forcing opponents to pay attention to them. Xavier Legette has had a brutally disappointing second season so far, Jalen Coker has yet to find his rhythm after sitting out the first six weeks on IR and there have been precious few flashes from everybody else involved.
To some extent it’s also on Canales to get those guys going, because his playcalling has been mostly-dismal this season after the opening script.
Bryce Young also has to do his part and throw the ball more accurately and more consistently, but he can only do so much when he’s throwing balls like this and Legette can’t even be bothered to fully extend his arms to try to make the catch.
Put it another way, McMillan’s lack of production in the second half has been a total team failure.
There’s still time to turn things around, but the problems for Canales are mounting – and right now he doesn’t look equipped to handle them.
We could be in for a brutal finish to the 2025 season given the strength of schedule and the fact that opponents will take what worked for the Saints on Sunday and copy it. Expect defenses to sell out to stop Rico Dowdle and force this very dysfunctional Panthers passing game to beat them.
Unless Canales seriously steps up his game and starts finding solutions on offense, there’s a real chance these Panthers have recorded their final win of the season already.
The New York Jets seemed to punt on the remainder of the 2025 season when they acquired future draft assets for star cornerback Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner and defensive tackle Quinnen Williams ahead of the Nov. 4 trade deadline.
Like Gardner, wide receiver Garrett Wilson committed his future to the Jets by signing a lucrative contract extension with the club this past summer. At the time, Wilson and Gardner were viewed as key figures who were supposed to help the Jets right the ship.
“Obviously, it’s kind of a reminder of the business that we’re in,” Wilson said about the Jets’ trade-deadline moves, as ESPN’s Rich Cimini shared for a piece published Thursday. “We’re all replaceable as hell. That’s just the way I see it.”
Long before Wilson put pen to paper on his four-year, $130M extension, he raised eyebrows when he said last December that he felt the Jets had “a losing problem” or losing “gene.” In early October of this year, Wilson insisted he didn’t regret inking his deal even though the Jets opened the ongoing season with four straight losses.
Of course, he offered those comments before the Jets ended this past weekend at 2-7 and before general manager Darren Mougey pressed a figurative reset button with his trades.
While Williams and Gardner have new NFL homes, running back Breece Hall stayed with the Jets through the trade deadline even though he is out of contract after the season. Stories have suggested Hall wanted to be traded to a championship contender this fall.
Like Gardner and Wilson, Hall was drafted by the Jets in the spring of 2022. Wilson and Hall have yet to be part of a winning season with the club.
“It’s very frustrating,” Hall said about the Jets’ records since 2022. “I don’t want to compare myself to other people, but I do feel like I’m one of the better running backs in the league. But if you’re losing games, and you’re getting down early, you can’t always show that. I’m definitely at a point in my career where I’ve been here for three or four years, where we expected to win, and it didn’t happen. So it sucks, but it is what it is.”
The Jets’ next chance to win will come when they play at the red-hot New England Patriots (8-2) on Thursday night. As of Thursday morning, ESPN BET had New York as a 13.5-point underdog for that contest.