RIP Carolina Panthers, 1995-2024

Two weeks into the regular season is a time for overreactions. Broad, sweeping statements about who sucks, who’s elite — both on a macro level about teams, and the micro when it comes to players. Truth be told, we still don’t know a lot about the 2024 NFL season, and yet one thing feels inevitable, past saving.

The Carolina Panthers.

It didn’t take a full home game, or even half, or even a quarter. The Panthers as fans knew them died long ago. The eulogy didn’t come in sweeping prose, but as $1.80 seats sold on the secondary market by season ticket holders who couldn’t endure the team anymore. The Panthers are now given as much time and attention as a child’s once-beloved toy they aged out of, tossed on a 50 cent table at a yard sale. A reminder that we all outgrow the things we once loved when they no longer bring us joy, and that every relationship, no matter how meaningful, can be pushed past its limit by neglect.

The organization, like all NFL teams, moves in ebbs and flows. The soaring excitement of birth with Kerry Collins, only to see the Penn State man-toddler who decided to quit football after being caught making racist remarks. The bridge years of Steve Beuerlein, restoring faith (albeit briefly) before it was whisked away once more, vanishing as quickly as Chris Weinke’s hairline. A desperate, flailing franchise, in 2003 fans finally had something to truly be proud of when Jake Delhomme arrived in Charlotte to teach us all how to really love NFL football for the first time.

Delhomme wasn’t perfect, far from it. He’d lock onto his first read, at times he’d fail to see Steve Smith sprinting along the sideline with 10 yards of daylight behind him. There were no tight spirals, lofted through the air with a flick of the wrist, but rather 30 passes a game of weird, off-axis throws that didn’t look like they should work, but somehow did. Nothing was pretty when it came to Jake, but dammit if he didn’t drag everyone along to victory, kicking and screaming whether they liked it or not.

It was during this era “Keep Pounding” was born. Never has a phrase that sounds so hilarious in isolation meant so much to a team, to a fanbase, to the ethos of what it meant to be a Panthers fan. It served both as inspiration never to quit on the field, but far more importantly to show grit and determination off of it. Legendary linebacker Sam Mills (serving at linebacker coach at the time) coined the phrase in 2004 ahead of the Panthers’ first playoff game in seven years. Mills was battling intestinal cancer, diagnosed shortly before the season began — and it wasn’t long after that outsider linebacker Mark Fields told his teammates he’d be missing the 2003 season after being diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma.

Mills stood in the Panthers locker room and begged the men he coached to keep fighting. To never quit as long as there was a shred of hope, because he promised them he’d keep pounding for as long as he possibly could. Mills kept pounding until the end, when he died surrounded by his family just 14 months after his now-legendary speech.

Fans endured the pain of losing the Super Bowl that year, but they never stopped pounding. Always ready to return the next fall with a renewed sense of vigor and determination. Hope ran eternal that any year could be our year, because Delhomme and the 2003 Panthers showed us it was possible. That era ran its course without much more success. Two more double-digit winning seasons and playoff runs, but no trophy to show for it.

It was now 2010, and it’s here much of my story begins. This is when I began writing about the Panthers over at Cat Scratch Reader, SB Nation’s Panthers blog. It’s truly impossible to articulate how ugly that season was. It was came during a rebuilding period, not entirely dissimilar to the one Carolina finds itself in now. Week after week we’d watch as the Panthers were demolished in a cloud of Jimmy Clausen’s platinum blonde ineptitude. For the first time in six years we had a fanbase that didn’t feel like it could Keep Pounding anymore. It was ready to give up the fight.

During those dark days I picked the good out of every week, meager crumbs that they were, writing a weekly Monday morning column with the express purpose of trying to pick the good out of whatever garbage we endured the day before. The Morning Morning Optimist is still alive on CSR, the torch being passed and “Keep Pounding” still echoing through our fanbase.

Then Cam Newton happened. A lightning strike of brilliance that captured the imagination like nothing that came before him, or has since. A unicorn athlete who played with reckless abandon, equally loved by Panthers fans as much as he was reviled by the rest of the league. Carolina had the most dynamic, most exciting player in the entire NFL for the first time in the history of the organization, and it was a dream. The shame about dreams is they’re often fleeting, and Newton’s era was far too short. Injuries mounted, the roster aged around him, and the end result was an era that was far too brief. Still, Newton’s light shone brighter than anyone who proceeded him, and burnt out just as fast.

Of course, this is what was happening on the field. Off it was another story for the Carolina Panthers. While Newton was leading another playoff charge in 2017 a story emerged that owner Jerry Richardson, patriarch of the Panthers, sexually harassed women employed by the team. It was clear the team needed to turn the page, to get new blood at the top — and Richardson agreed to sell the team and move on.

The excitement for new ownership was palpable. Someone who could modernize the team’s football operations and stop treating it like a small, family-owned business. Rumors swirled of Jay-Z buying the team, Jeff Bezos, a who’s-who of big name billionaires. Soon it became clear that all roads were leading to David Tepper, a minority owner of the Steelers who seemed fine on first glance, but scratch beneath the surface and it was far uglier. Sadly, I saw those tea leaves taking shape when Tepper was only a finalist to buy the team. I pleaded, a man screaming into the void of inevitability, that the team I loved wouldn’t be purchased by David Tepper — but to no avail.

Of all the horrible characteristics an owner can have, thinking they’re a football genius tops the list. Being a minority owner of the Steelers had Tepper truly believe he was somehow responsible for the success Pittsburgh had on the field. It was his mission to achieve the same in Charlotte, and put his stamp on the team he’d just bought. Truth be told, it’s here where things got actually painful as a Panthers far for the first time in history. If 1995 to 2017 were marked by typical fan frustration, 2018-present have been drenched inWen despair. So let’s just run down Tepper’s greatest hits:

1. Fired Ron Rivera for a 5-7 start to the season, predominantly so he could hire “his guy”
2. Hand-picked Matt Rhule to be his first coaching hire and gave an unproven college coach control of an NFL roster
3. Oversaw Newton getting run out of town and replaced him with a revolving door of ineptitude at quarterback
4. Churned through three head coaches in five years, when prior to Tepper the Panthers had had three head coaches in 19 YEARS.
5. Routinely called his own shots at the draft, superseding the advice of his football staff

That’s just the football side of things. It would take a whole other story to discuss shady business practices with the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina over a new practice facility, moving training camp out of Spartanburg, where it had been since the team’s inception, and strong-arming local government over stadium financing.

Now we’re closing in on the state of the Panthers right now, and more specifically Bryce Young, who is the new hot scapegoat for everything wrong with David Tepper’s dumpster fire. Revisionist history has plagued Young from the second he showed signs of struggle under Frank Reich, another horrific coaching hire by Tepper.

Forget that Young was the lock No. 1 pick all year long, a 47-touchdown-throwing Heisman QB that thrived in Alabama’s pro style system during a time where Nick Saban’s team was retooling itself. Leading up to the 2023 NFL Draft Young was still everyone’s No. 1 pick, and on draft night there were no claims Carolina had made the wrong pick. Curiously this changed by Week 4 of the 2023 season, and suddenly there were thousands of social media geniuses who “knew he’d be garbage.”

Did Young, who had a football career littered with winning, big numbers, and high praise suddenly reach the NFL and forget how to play football, or was he just another victim of a franchise that had become a black hole for talent and potential?

I want nothing more than for Bryce Young to succeed. Not for selfish reasons as a fan, or the fact it makes life easier — but that by all accounts he’s just a really nice guy. Young doesn’t have Clausen’s entitlement issues, or any off-field reason to dislike him. He didn’t asked to be born smaller than most NFL quarterbacks, and lord knows he didn’t ask to be drafted by the Panthers.

At this point I don’t know if he can be redeemed. Bryce might have always been small, but it wasn’t until this year that he started playing small. Someone had occurred in this latest shift to yet another head coach in Dave Canales that has Young uncomfortable in the pocket, jump passing when he doesn’t need to, missing passes the threaded with ease a year ago, and generally looking bad. His mechanics have gone to shit, the Panthers might be the worst team we’ve seen in over a decade, and there’s no hope on the horizon.

More than all that: The heart has been ripped from the fanbase. “Keep Pounding” is gone, existing only as a marketing slogan printed on a jersey collar. It’s one thing to ask fans to push through adversity, but when that adversity has lasted Tepper’s entire ownership reign it’s dragged them down and broken them. When a home opener is a cacophony of boos, discount sold tickets, and a sea of justified frustration two weeks into the season it’s a sign that people have checked out. Nobody talks about the Panthers day-to-day anymore. They’re simply a known, accepted disappointment we all endure, the problematic family member we still love, but know it’s just not healthy to be around anymore.

Hope used to spring eternal in these parts. Passion ran over. People were engaged, and talking. Discussing needed roster improvements, guys were we happy with, hashing out future changes that could get the Panthers over the hump.

Now it’s been replaced with apathy. The only emotion you’ll hear is anger directed at David Tepper for taking our jewel and smashing it with his ego and ineptitude. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Seemingly no way out for years. An NFL team will still exist in Charlotte, taking the field every fall Sunday — and sure, in time they might actually win again.

The Panthers as we knew them? They’re gone, and never coming back. A weekly reminder that no amount of attention, or love, or care can stop idiots in power from ruining something you loved so much. The 2024 season was supposed to be the 30th anniversary of the Carolina Panthers, but they didn’t live long enough to see their birthday, not really.

Rest in peace, Carolina Panthers. You were once beautiful, and you were ours. Now we don’t recognize you anymore.

Cause of death: David Tepper.