After draft day, hope floats — even for the Panthers

Will the Carolina Panthers’ 2025 draft class make the team a contender again? Nobody knows — yet. And WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says the anticipation is a beautiful thing.

NFL experts have given the Carolina Panthers mostly positive reviews for last week’s draft. It's the first time in a while we’ve been able to use “mostly positive” and “Carolina Panthers” in the same sentence.

The Panthers took one of the top-rated wide receivers, Arizona’s Tetairoa McMillan, with the eighth overall pick in the draft. In the second and third rounds, they added pass rushers: Texas A&M’s Nic Scourton and Ole Miss’ Princely Umanmielen. (Princely, by the way, has three brothers: Prince, Princewill and Princeton.) The Panthers rounded out the draft with a running back, a safety, a nose tackle, a tight end and another wide receiver.

Teams draft to fill holes, and the Panthers have holes everywhere, but wide receiver and pass rusher are the widest and deepest. So the team doubled up at each of those spots.

If you quit following the Panthers at some point, that’s totally understandable. Since 2020, they have had the worst record in the league. And Bryce Young, the quarterback they traded a treasure chest for two years ago, spent the first season and a half of his career looking like an all-time bust.

But toward the end of last year, Young started looking like the player the Panthers had hoped for. They nearly beat both Super Bowl teams —
Philadelphia and Kansas City — and won two of their last three games. The season went into the books at 5-12, but into fans’ hearts as a long-awaited sign of hope.

Hope is what the NFL draft is really all about. History shows that even a lot of top picks never pan out. Most players drafted in the later rounds soon end up as high school coaches or insurance agents. Scroll through the Panthers’ draft history and you’ll find a lot of names you forgot or never knew.

But every so often, a gem emerges from the silt. In 2021, the Panthers spent a fourth-round pick on running back Chuba Hubbard, who has become the team’s most reliable weapon. And back in 2001, in the third round, the team took wide receiver Steve Smith — a Hall of Fame finalist and probably the second-best player in Panthers history behind Cam Newton.

Is Tetairoa McMillan this year’s Steve Smith? Is one of those pass rushers this year’s Julius Peppers? We don’t know and won’t know until this fall at the earliest. But from now until then, we get to luxuriate in hope. And Panthers fans deserve all the luxury they can get.