Cat Scratch Disbeliever

A deep dive into an "up and coming" team's stats reveals flags, dropped passes and a run defense so bad that it forces a narrative U-turn back to the 1987 replacement games.

Jaycee Horn and Ickey Ekwonu are not great football players.

Oh, Horn is very good. The Panthers cornerback is undeniably talented. He can look like an All Pro for stretches. But then he gets burned like this:

Yes, yes, Horn can be seen stomping his feet at Jordan Fuller after giving up that touchdown. He expected safety help but didn’t get it. Rashid Shaheed still vaporized him by three steps. “Safety help” doesn’t mean “It’s OK to barely stay in the television frame.”

If that were an isolated incident, then whatever. But it wasn’t. Here’s Horn giving up a sideline touchdown to Quentin Johnston.

Horn maintains excellent position. Justin Herbert delivers a great throw. But Johnston – QUENTIN JOHNSTON, Mister Run Straight And Bobble Everything, outplays Horn for the football.

Herbert was also not afraid to challenge Horn, who was targeted 64 times in 15 games in 2024, a pretty standard figure for a good-not-great starting cornerback. For comparison’s sake, opponents targeted Jalen Ramsey just 48 times in 17 games, Patrick Surtain 46 times in 16 games. And it’s not like opponents were chucking the ball downfield to keep up with the Panthers offense.

Need more evidence that Horn can be a tad shaky? Here’s D.J. Moore catching a touchdown pass against him in Week 5. It’s the first play in the video. Horn gets stuck in crosstown traffic while covering Moore on a deep over route:

I hesitate to post clips of plays, and not just because they require many of you to make extra clicks. There’s always an imaginary mega-genius film expert whispering within the anxiety receptors of my cerebellum when I discuss individual plays. Um, actually, the Panthers are in Cover-37 Invert Thumbs on that play, and Horn is playing flail technique, meaning he’s supposed to trade off the boundary receiver to squat on the slot receiver running into the flat, unless the shortstop is in the low post. Perhaps I just lack the subtlety to understand why the cornerback in obvious man coverage is three-to-seven steps behind his receiver on these plays. But both Sports Info Solutions and Pro Football Focus charged Horn with five touchdowns allowed, and that’s a lot for a guy with a $100-million contract.

Also a lot: Horn’s seven pass interference penalties and three defensive holds. Two of the holds were declined, but Horn still risked giving opponents a lot of free first downs.

Speaking of penalties: Ekwonu committed four holds (one declined), five false starts, an illegal use of hands, a blindside block and a facemask foul in 2024. But at least Ekwonu delivered quality reps like the one in this link, where Carl Lawson – who is NOT Micah Parsons – only needed to make one quick stutter step for the Panthers’ left tackle to whiff.

Per Sports Info Solutions, Ekwonu had the 14th-highest blown block rate among linemen who played 500-plus snaps. There are two Texans above him, plus guys like Wanya Morris and Nicholas Petit-Frere who were famously overmatched.

I loved Ekwonu as a draft prospect. Like Horn, his talent is undeniable, and he can look great for long stretches, particularly when run blocking or leading screens. But he commits far too many penalties and is often a danger to his quarterback.

Writing the Panthers chapter of Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac 2025 required watching lots of Panthers football, which was not as bad as it sounds. The Panthers were involved in lots of close games late in the year, after Bryce Young returned from exile in Lilliput as a much-improved lil’ quarterback. The Panthers hung tough against the Chiefs, Eagles and (in their first meeting) Buccaneers. They also beat the Giants (in overtime), Cardinals (overtime) and Falcons (overtime).

There’s serious optimism surrounding the Panthers. You can get them at +250 to reach the playoffs right now, though I recommend donating that money to charity or burying it in your backyard instead.

Have you ever watched the first half of, say, an Alabama versus University of Phoenix game, where the Tide are obviously playing with their food and briefly trail 10-3 because the freshman quarterback threw an interception and their defense got caught being ultra-aggressive on a double-reverse? That’s what the Chiefs and Eagles nailbiters against the Panthers looked like on closer examination. (The Bucs game was typical NFC South sludge, complete with shanked punts.) It looked like Steve Spagnuolo and Todd Bowles were beta-testing wacky new new blitz packages against what they considered a glorified scout team, then were shocked when Young and the Panthers proved semi-capable of defending themselves. The Panthers did not really turn the corner last year so much as show up in the paddock for the first time.

Speaking of Panthers first-round picks and paddocks, Xavier Legette was the NFL’s honorary correspondent at the Kentucky Derby. Legette grew up in horse country and is a colorful character who talked inside baseball with Jayson Werth and shared raccoon stew recipes with Guy Fieri. Legette looked HUGE at Churchill Downs, and also during the Panthers’ schedule release video, which pokes fun at his extra-thick drawl but not his extra-thicc thighs.

Yes, Legette’s shoulders look yoked, but jumbo-sized receivers should give Panthers fans Kelvin Benjamin flashbacks.

Legette dropped seven passes per Pro Football Reference in 2024, six per SIS and five per FTN. He caught just 49 passes. Several of the drops were bounce-off-his-belly affairs; some of the sketchy ones involved a defender arriving right on time and jarring the ball loose. I liked Legette coming out of South Carolina, but he does not know how to secure the football, and growing to edge rusher proportions probably isn’t the right career move for him.

Dave Canales, on the other hand, sees Legette as a potential DK Metcalf-like offensive weapon. The Panthers indeed considered pursuing Metcalf but changed their minds. So they are growing their own instead. Legette caught just 7-of-25 targets of 15-plus air yards. He has a way to go before becoming a dangerous deep threat.

And then there’s Derrick Brown, the Panthers’ first-round pick in 2021. He made the Pro Bowl in 2023 but missed nearly all of last year with a torn meniscus. He’s good. But he was “week-to-week” in his recovery as of last week, per Canales.

Of course, the former first-round Panthers pick who matters most is not Brown, Horn, Ekwonu or Legette, but Young. The Almanac chapter focuses largely on Young while taking a closer look at the Panthers’ second-half flicker of competitiveness.

I’m not going to go into Young here. For the moment, let’s nod along with the narrative that he improved so much last year that he’s now a budding mid-2010s Russell Wilson, even though that narrative has been propelled by:

• Folks not playing close attention;

• Panthers fans with Stockholm Syndrome after a half-decade of five-win seasons, and

• Adherents to the Adopt-A-Bad-Team-As-Your-Sleeper offseason content model.

Young indeed improved from Lollipop Guild laughingstock to pesky perpetrator of fourth-down miracles after last year’s benching, and that shouldn’t be completely scoffed at. But he needs a supporting cast capable of fostering further development. What he has instead is an unpredictably wobbly left tackle, a wide receiver who is starting to look like a left tackle and a defense whose biggest stars are either coming off troubling injuries or allowed too many Shaheed/Johnston-caliber receivers to escape from Jaycee Island.

The entire edifice of Panthers optimism is built out of guys like this, first-round picks from the last five years whose biggest selling point is that they were first-round picks from the last five years, and who sometimes look great when healthy (Brown), or focused (Horn), or not doing any serious pass protecting (Ekwonu), or in comparison to how they looked in 2023 (Young) or when visiting Flavortown (Legette). Horn and Brown are the only ones who appear good enough to start for a Super Bowl contender, and they would probably be the gambling cornerback who relies heavily on the pass rush and the “other lineman” who eats up blocks for a Watt/Bosa/Parsons.

Well, at least the Panthers’ second-round picks in recent years have panned out, right? Oof. There’s Jonathon Brooks, who … was injured when the Panthers drafted him and is now injured again. There’s Jonathan Mingo, already traded to the Cowboys. Terrance Marshall? He caught three passes for the Raiders last year. Yetur Gross-Matos and Jeremy Chinn? Both are useful defenders, but both disappeared as free agents during the regime change from Scott Fitterer to Dan Morgan.

I can hear Panthers fans protesting now. You are ignoring the impressive draft class! And the free agent additions! The Panthers draft class looks fine, but most of their last five draft classes looked fine on paper. If guys like Tetairoa McMillan, Nic Scourton and Princely Umanmielen develop quickly, we can revisit them when discussing the 2026 Panthers.

And as for those free agents – Tre’von Moehrig, Tershawn Wharton, Bobby Brown, Christian Rozeboom, etc. – all but Moehrig would make adequate backups for the Bills. They’ll help the Panthers defense a bit. But the Panthers defense needs more than a bit of help. It allowed 179.8 rushing yards allowed per game in 2024, the highest figure since the Falcons allowed 182.3 yards per game during the strike-impacted 1987 season.

We Interrupt this Column to Talk About a Team From Nearly 40 Years Ago

That 182.3 yard-per-game factoid led me on a deep dive about the 1987 Falcons, because two things that really rev my engines are: 1) talking about the replacement games; and 2) ripping the Falcons.

The 1987 Falcons faced the 49ers in one of the “replacement” games. The 49ers were loaded with strikebreakers. The Falcons had a smattering, but no one significant. Roger Craig and Joe Cribbs combined for 158 rushing yards in one game against glorified construction workers. Veteran running back Charles White also crossed picket lines for the Rams to face the Fake Falcons, rushing for 155 yards. But the real problems with the 1987 Falcons occurred before and after the strike.

The Falcons were a dreadful franchise under the mismanagement of owner Rankin Smith and his family, who fired Dan Henning (a Joe Gibbs protege) after a 7-8-1 season in 1986. Smith & Sons tried to drag Dick Vermeil out of the broadcast booth and Terry Donahue out of UCLA, then embarked on a clandestine effort to lure Bill Parcells away from the Giants.

The Big Tuna was very much under contract, so commissioner Pete Rozelle put the kibosh on those proceedings. So Smith & Sons shrugged and promoted defensive coordinator Marion Campbell, who coached the Falcons through some awful seasons in the 1970s and was not long removed from an unsuccessful stint as Vermiel’s successor with the Eagles. Let’s call Campbell by his Swamp Fox nickname, for reasons which will soon become obvious.

Chris Miller, the Falcons’ first-round pick at quarterback, did not sign until well into the season. Swamp Fox’s non-strike quarterbacks were therefore David Archer and Scott Campbell, no relation. Swamp Fox replaced the ineffective Archer in the season opener. Campbell played well until the strike, then went into a wicked slump soon after the real players returned. Archer complained publicly when the coach did not switch back quickly enough, so Swamp Fox dug in and kept tossing Campbell onto the field.

Meanwhile, the Falcons lost defensive linemen Tony Casillas and Rick Bryan, both former first-round picks (Casillas a college legend), to late-season injuries, which did not do wonders for their run defense.

Finally, Miller signed, got thrown into the lineup and was horrible. The Falcons had been through a lot and appeared to quit at the end of the 1987 season, losing their final three games 98-20 and letting White, Craig, Cribbs, Steve Young and others run roughshod over them. The Falcons allowed 40 carries per game, a remarkable feat that can only be achieved by a combination of a terrible run defense and an offense that cannot even make the fourth quarter of a blowout look respectable.

And that, dear friends, is the caliber of football team the Panthers brought to mind last year, in what is being sold as a turn-the-corner season.

And Now Back to the 2025 Panthers

Still interested in the Panthers to make the playoffs at +250?

This column has morphed into an edition of The Defector’s Why Your Team Sucks. That wasn’t my intention when I set out to write it. I think the Horn extension makes sense, because he’s so darn good when he’s at his best. There are worse left tackles than Ekwonu, and linemen sometimes develop extra slowly. Legette has a great locker-room reputation, which is important for a young receiver. (I am planning a Packers essay.) Young hasn’t reached Sunk Cost Fallacy levels yet, and appears to be a gritty grinder when the chips are down. (I am planning a Bears essay.) This franchise has been mismanaged in complex, imaginative ways over the last five years but now at least appears capable of doing normal-team stuff like extending the contracts of young veterans. That’s a start.

I’m just trying to illustrate what players and teams look like when you examine them really closely: tape, stats, historical comparisons, etc. DVOA projections crunch a gazillion little variables, all of them with some measure of proven predictive value, to spit out a range of projections. Many of those variables are things you have never thought of, or wouldn’t be eager to try to quantify precisely if you did think of them. Some things you think might matter – like a better record in December/January than September/October – barely matter at all, because historical research says they don’t.

The Panthers have a young roster that got better down the stretch in 2024 and added pieces in the offseason. But their left tackle blows blocks and commits too many penalties. Their top cornerback allows deep touchdowns and commits too many penalties. The receiver they are touting as WR1 dropped 9.4% of his targets as a rookie. Their run defense was almost as bad as a team of strikebreakers last year.

Oh, and the Panthers fielded the ninth-oldest roster last year, per Snap Weighted Age. Sure, there’s some Andy Dalton and Jadeveon Clowney in that data. But teams we don’t generally think of as “young,” like the Eagles and Buccaneers, were younger than the Panthers in 2024.

In short, there’s a lot for Panthers fans to worry about before they start worrying about Young.

As for the rest of us, we should just be looking elsewhere for our sleeper-team candidates.

(Note: This was the second of a series of columns stemming from my research for Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac 2025. There will be a few more before I pivot to a new historical series.)