The Carolina Panthers took a hard fall in the Week 2 NFL power rankings after getting run over by the Chicago Bears in their opener, a 59-37 loss at home that exposed just how far off the defense was.
This one turned into a track meet, then a runaway. Carolina and Chicago were dead even at 31 before Caleb Williams and the Bears piled on 28 more points to finish the job. By the end of it, the Panthers had surrendered 59 points, 552 total yards, 261 through the air and 291 on the ground.
The offense did its part. Bryce Young and Carolina put up 37 points and rolled up 478 total yards, including 353 passing yards and 125 rushing yards. But the scoreboard still told the story: the Panthers couldn’t keep pace because the defense never found an answer.
That left Dave Canales’ team slotted one spot ahead of the Las Vegas Raiders, who are 1-0, and one spot behind the New Orleans Saints, who are 0-1.
Canales didn’t sugarcoat what he saw from his group. “I saw the guys battle.
I saw them play really hard. Toughness, physicality, all that stuff is not the problem,” Canales said.
“We've just got to make sure we're all connected with the run game, so we're not trying to make a play that's not ours to make, and I think that's what's going to show up without having watched the film. Typically, when it happens that way, it's somebody playing out of their responsibility and not trusting the guy next to them to be able to do theirs, and that's the part where we have to come together, and we've got to make sure that we solidify: just trust your responsibility, play together so we can mitigate some of those big plays.
"We've just got to get back to work. The guys are here.
They're ours. We're all together.
We're a team. We'll hit it that way.
They'll be studs about it. Ask them to do that, just in the locker room, say we're going to come back.
Let's be truthful about what it is and let's just take the next step and get better."
Carolina’s next step has to come on defense. If it doesn’t, the Panthers are going to be in trouble after making the postseason in 2025.
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Bolden is still early in his college journey, but the appeal is pretty clear: he has the kind of range and versatility that can help a defense handle modern passing games, along with the developmental runway teams crave when they are trying to build a secondary for the future. The Panthers are not shopping for answers in next spring's draft here, but if Bolden keeps trending the way evaluators expect, he is the sort of player who could eventually make Carolinas attention feel less like speculation and more like a head start. [Read more 🡒]