Carolina Panthers end their preseason with one more win and one key question
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The Carolina Panthers’ preseason trudged to an end against Houston on Friday night, in a game where neither team played their starters and at halftime the two teams had combined for three field goals and zero TDs.
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Eventually, the Panthers won another exhibition, 16-13, over the Texans at Bank of America Stadium, forcing Houston into four turnovers.
And now, as the Panthers begin the long wait before the regular-season opener, you’d have to say that the public part of this preseason has been successful.
The Panthers finished 3-1, after all, and only threw in one real stinker — a disjointed loss at Buffalo. On Friday, after a storm had delayed fans in Charlotte from entering the stadium until 6:15 p.m., 45 minutes before kickoff, the Carolina backups ended up with a workmanlike, 9-to-5 type victory over Houston’s backups.
Carolina sat out 30 players, which meant for instance that fourth-string Carolina quarterback Kyle Trask played for nearly three full quarters.
“I mean, it was a grind,” Panthers coach Dave Canales said of the game afterward. “We’re battling back and forth, and the defenses were handling business for a while. Really excited about just creating the turnovers. That really gave us a chance to get the lead.”
Next on the Panthers’ agenda: cutting more than 30 players to get down to the 53 who make the active roster. They have to reach the 53-man limit by Sunday at 6 p.m., although the first wave of cuts will come Saturday. And shortly after that, all these fake games are forgotten and the rest of it turns real.
So here you come again, NFL regular season.
What do we make of the Panthers at this point?
As I mentioned, the public part of their preseason looked good. The most troubling sign I saw was something fans weren’t allowed to see — the joint practice against Houston on Wednesday. In that, both teams played their best players and Houston’s defensive line eviscerated the Panthers’ offensive line.
In a real game, Bryce Young would have been sacked at least a half-dozen times and probably more. None of the Panthers’ drives in that joint practice ended two doors down from the end zone, either — most of them were more like a mile. Canales called it “pretty lopsided,” and that was being kind.
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So that’s the biggest question, in a nutshell: Can the Panthers O-line hold up well enough to make this offense any good?
Is this the type of team that has enough of an imagination library in its playbook to figure it out when they’re playing edge rushers like Danielle Hunter and Will Anderson Jr.?
It is true that in the joint workout, the Panthers mostly left their offensive tackles on islands in the stream, rather than helping them out with chips and screens. In a real game, they’d adjust more.
Still, you wonder. In the Bryce Young era, we have seen so many of those 3- and 7-point first halves, forcing Carolina to try and make another big comeback in the fourth quarter?
Friday, though, was a modest win for the backups and for the fans who braved the rain and showed up. They were rewarded by a literal rainbow appearing above the stands in the first quarter — a coat of many colors, cascading over the stadium.
And if you made it all the way to the bottom of this column about the fourth preseason game of the Carolina Panthers, congratulations.
You also get bonus points if you caught my (sometimes clunky) references to five different Dolly Parton songs and my very favorite one of her many philanthropic endeavors — the Imagination Library, which provides free books to very young children. Sign up for it if there’s one of those in your family.
Hey, it’s the last exhibition game, the one where both teams sit 25-30 of their best players on the bench and the result doesn’t matter.
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In my line of work, game columns don’t get more meaningless than that.
So it seemed only right to use this space to celebrate someone, too.
RIP, Dolly.
This story was originally published August 29, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
