Dan Morgan deserves credit for helping reshape the Carolina Panthers roster, but Sunday’s 43-13 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers made it impossible to ignore the cracks that are still there.
A game that ugly does not land on one person. Bryce Young turned it over three times.
The defense was gashed for 258 rushing yards. The offensive line gave up five sacks.
There’s more than enough blame to spread around.
Still, the disaster in Tampa Bay put a few of Morgan’s roster choices under the microscope, especially the ones tied to depth and injury insurance.
The biggest issue, in this view, came at cornerback. Carolina had been living without its top two corners for weeks, with Jaycee Horn and Mike Jackson on injured reserve since late September. The Panthers responded by bringing Robert Rochell back to the practice squad and rolling with Will Lee III, Akayleb Evans and Chau Smith-Wade on the active roster.
That was the spot where adding another veteran would have made sense.
It is true that there may not have been some clean, obvious trade just waiting for Carolina. No one outside the building knows what other teams wanted, which players were actually on the market or how those conversations played out.
But from the outside, the Panthers looked short at the position. They did not need a shutdown star.
They needed someone dependable enough to help bridge the gap until Horn and Jackson returned.
Now the situation has thinned out even more, with Evans also dealing with an injury.
Morgan may have looked at that stretch and decided the Panthers could survive it without paying a premium for a short-term fix. If that was the calculation, it makes sense. But the result Sunday made the decision look riskier than it did before.
The same thing applies to the edge group. Carolina was already dealing with injuries there, too. Jaelan Phillips missed the Buccaneers game with a hamstring injury, Thomas Incoom was moved to injured reserve with a calf injury, and the Panthers elevated Nick Hampton from the practice squad before kickoff.
By that point, the team was digging deep enough that players who were not expected to carry major workloads were being pushed into bigger roles. That is part of life in the NFL, but the drop-off was obvious, and Carolina did not get enough from the group left standing.
That said, Morgan’s most defensible move may also be the one that made Sunday sting the most.
Protecting Bryce Young had to be the priority. The Panthers had already seen enough of Young behind a bad line to know they could not keep sending him out there like that. Morgan attacked the problem, signing Robert Hunt and Damien Lewis to deals worth a combined $153 million in 2024.
At the time, that looked like the right call, and it still does in principle. But after Young was sacked five times by Tampa Bay, the payoff was nowhere near good enough for one afternoon.
Not every sack falls on the line. Young can get rid of the ball faster at times, and sometimes the defender simply wins. But a unit that expensive should not get overwhelmed for an entire game.
None of that means Morgan suddenly deserves to be written off because of one loss. He has clearly upgraded parts of the roster, and there are moves he has made that still look right.
But general managers are judged on more than the wins that come from good decisions. They are also judged on whether they left enough cover for the roster when injuries hit and when the depth chart starts getting tested.
Sunday showed where Carolina was vulnerable. Morgan built this team.
He does not get blamed for the turnovers, the missed assignments or every bad snap. Those belong to the players and coaches as well.
But he is the one who assembled the roster they are working with. After a 43-13 loss that exposed so many holes, some of that blame has to land on him, too.
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The Panthers are still waiting on help at cornerback, even with Jaycee Horn and Mike Jackson expected back from injuries in the coming weeks. In the meantime, Carolina is leaning on thin depth at one of the most vulnerable spots on the roster, with Robert Rochell giving the secondary some support after being elevated from the practice squad.
For a team trying to protect itself from another setback, the concern is less about the immediate return of two starters and more about what happens if the timeline shifts again. The Panthers have already felt how quickly cornerback depth can disappear, and the longer they go without another body there, the more exposed they stay if either Horn or Jackson is not ready or gets nicked up again. [Read more 🡒]
Panthers Had A Few Bright Spots In A Loss That Got Worse
The Panthers 43-13 loss to Tampa Bay was ugly enough on its own, but the tape still offered a few small positives for Carolina to cling to. Pro Football Focus grades pointed to Damien Lewis and Taylor Moton as two of the better offensive performers, a reminder that even in a lopsided defeat there were at least a couple of spots where the line held up better than the final score suggested.
Defensively, though, the review was tougher to absorb after the Buccaneers piled up 258 rushing yards and three touchdowns on the ground. Akayleb Evans came out as Carolinas lowest-graded defender, a troubling note in a game where the Panthers had already lost control early and then watched the damage keep building as Tampa Bay kept pounding away. [Read more 🡒]