Carolina Panthers 2026: The Coverage Report — Fewest Graded Takes in the League, and 83 Cutdown Calls Still Ungraded

Every number below comes from the takes we track — the outlets, shows and podcasts in this database. It is not a census of all football media. It is a census of ours, and on that measure Carolina is the least-covered team in the league.

The baseline: last of 32

Group every graded take by team and the Panthers finish 32nd out of 32.

Carolina has 120 graded takes. The next-thinnest club, the Arizona Cardinals, has 130; the Kansas City Chiefs have 389. The median club sits around 207, so the Panthers file is roughly 42 percent below a typical team's. The raw take count (431) is second-lowest, ahead only of Atlanta's 323.

That is not obviously what the club's results earned. Per the team's page, Carolina went 8-9 in 2025 and made the playoffs — the franchise's first postseason appearance since 2017, after 2-15 in 2023 and 5-12 in 2024. Our division-winner grading treats Carolina as the 2025 NFC South winner, with Tampa Bay as the naive pick every correct caller had to beat. A club that goes from two wins to a division title in two years is normally a punditry magnet. In our data, it stayed quiet.

The flip side: what little got said about Carolina scored well. The Panthers' +55.52 average skill delta is the second-highest of any team, behind only Seattle (+58.60), and their 66.8 average accuracy is fourth. Some of that is genuine — pundits who backed Carolina in 2025 backed a team the naive baseline said would lose the division. Some of it is the arithmetic of a small file: 120 takes is not many, and a handful of high-difficulty hits move the mean a long way.

The cutdown: 83 calls, none graded

The news hook of this series does not yet have a graded record here. We hold 83 roster-spot calls on the Panthers, and zero of them have been graded. Every row is still pending. Site-wide, only 49 roster-spot calls have ever been graded across all teams, so this is a category-wide backlog, not a Carolina one.

What we can report is the shape of the file, which is unusually deep for a club this lightly covered. Carolina's 83 pending roster calls sit behind Buffalo (332), Washington (195), San Francisco (133) and Green Bay (132), and level with Dallas (83). Almost all of Carolina's volume comes from one place: a full 53-man projection published August 13 by Zach Roberts, who has no pundit page on the site, naming a player at every spot — Monroe Freeling, Rasheed Walker, Stone Forsythe and Albert Reese IV at tackle; Tommy Tremble, Mitchell Evans and Ja'Tavion Sanders at tight end; Jaycee Horn, Mike Jackson, Will Lee III, Chau Smith-Wade, Corey Thornton and Akayleb Evans at corner.

The calls with the most riding on them, and the ones to watch when grades land:

• Ja'Tavion Sanders. Nathan Jahnke, twice in the last week of August: "Unless the Panthers keep five tight ends, he is unlikely to make the roster." Roberts had Sanders on his 53 two weeks earlier. Two of our sources, opposite calls, same player.
• Darren Waller. Carter Bahns had him among veterans he expected cut before the deadline — "the question is whether there is room for both Ja'Tavion Sanders and Waller."
• Haynes King. Four separate calls that the undrafted rookie quarterback does not stick: Mark Powell and Zachary Rotman jointly called him the "most painful" cut, and Roberts wrote that a hamstring injury could push him to the practice squad, "where another NFL team will almost surely poach him." Roberts' own earlier projection had King making it.
• The receiver room. Roberts expected Tetairoa McMillan, Jalen Coker, Xavier Legette and Brycen Tremayne "to make it easily," with John Metchie III as the possible odd man out. Raju Byfield had gone the other way a day earlier, writing that Metchie "seemingly solidified his spot."

None of that is scored yet. When the grades land, we will update; until then, nobody on Carolina's cutdown has earned a record, good or bad.

What is actually graded

Sixteen claim types carry at least one Carolina grade. Three of them carry most of the weight.

Mock drafts are the bulk: 49 graded calls, 64.5 average accuracy, +36.63 skill. Sleeper calls are the file's engine — 19 graded, 89.5 accuracy, +148 skill, and almost all of it is one player. Ryan Wormeli (twice), Pat Fitzmaurice and Derek Brown all scored 100 with +200 skill on Tetairoa McMillan, who was priced around WR36 and finished WR13. Fitzmaurice's version: "My second favorite value pick for twenty twenty five... ECRs wide receiver twenty eight fifty nine overall. I have him at wide receiver twenty one forty six overall."

The same room produced the file's cleanest disagreement. Derek Brown called Chuba Hubbard a bust at a top-20 RB price — Hubbard finished RB42, scoring 100 and +200. Fitzmaurice ("I would be perfectly comfortable taking him early in the fourth") and Chris Welsh ("I kind of see him as a value") took the other side and scored 0 with −200 apiece.

Where Carolina coverage went badly is the short-range stuff. Game-outcome picks on the Panthers: 6 graded, 33.3 accuracy, −53 skill. Three of them are the same Week 18 game against Tampa Bay, which Carolina lost 16-14 — JP Acosta, Danny Parkins and the Pushing the Pile podcast all took Carolina and all scored 0 at −106. Season win totals were closer than the reputation suggests: five pundits put a number on the 2025 Panthers, averaging 7.1 against eight actual wins, with Rich Eisen high at 10 and Brady Quinn low at 5.

Who has a Carolina record

Seven pundits have five or more graded takes on the Panthers. That is the whole named field, and five graded calls is thin enough that none of these should be read as a ranking — it is a list of who showed up.

Derek Brown leads on volume with 11 graded (72.8 accuracy, +102.37 skill on this team, against a career 62.71 accuracy across 114 graded takes). Kyle Crabbs also has 11, at 43.9 accuracy — his file is mostly full seven-round mocks, where projecting a specific Panthers pick in round five is a near-coin-flip. Chris Brockman has five graded and the most repeated Carolina opinion in the database: he called the Panthers the NFC South team to beat in January 2025 and was wrong for that season (0, −100), then said it again in April, November and December 2025 and was right three times over (100, at +200, +144 and +128).

That is the Carolina file in full: 120 graded takes, one very good receiver call made by four different people, one division call made repeatedly by one person, and 83 cutdown predictions still waiting on a grade.