Second quarter<\/p>\n
Week 5 \u2014 Bye
Week 6 \u2014 at Philadelphia
Week 7 \u2014 Tampa Bay
Week 8 \u2014 at Green Bay (Thursday Night Football)
Week 9 \u2014 Denver<\/p>\n
Getting the break and then a chance to study enough of the Eagles (with new offensive coordinator Sean Mannion, and first-round receiver Makai Lemon, and the anticipated departure of wideout AJ Brown), there will be some tendencies on tape.<\/p>\n
Kuechly: “By that time, we’re going to have a really good feel for what they look like.”<\/p>\n
Jansen: “It’ll be interesting to see how we handle an earlier bye. The last couple of years, we’ve had the later bye. I know coach (Dave) Canales and the staff, they really use the bye week to begin to do a self-scout. Hey, what have we done? What are our tendencies? What are the things we’d like to maybe change about what we’re doing, all those sorts of things?<\/p>\n
“So you could walk out there Week 6 and have a new sense of who you are. Philadelphia, right, they’re a really good team. They’re going to challenge you in a lot of different ways. They’re big, they’re physical. Probably for the last four or five years have had the best roster in football, and the proof is in the pudding. So that’s going to be a big test.”<\/p>\n
The Panthers then return to division play with the Buccaneers at home, but it’s a very different Bucs team. With wide receiver Mike Evans gone to San Francisco and linebacker Lavonte David retired, they might be hard to recognize.<\/p>\n
Kuechly: “It’s a division game at home. And it’s just a one game at a time mentality. I don’t think you start looking ahead. I don’t think you start looking ahead to the Packers or the Broncos. I think it’s just one game at a time. And hopefully at that point, we’re sitting in pretty good shape. And I think we’ll have a really good feel for what our team looks like in this stretch, Tampa, Green Bay, Denver. I think we’ll have a really good feel for what the 2026 Carolina Panthers are going to look like.<\/p>\n
“I mean, Tampa beat us last game of the season last year. So it’s still wide open, but I’m excited that in our first block of four, we get a division game, and our next block of four, we get another division game, and then it continues that way. They’re not all cramped together like they traditionally are.”<\/p>\n
With the Thursday road game at Green Bay in Week 8, they get a short week. But Jansen, a father of four, sees it from the home perspective.<\/p>\n
Jansen: “My kids will be thrilled because on Halloween night, I’ll be home.”<\/p>\n
At this point, they compared candy strategies (Jansen’s a big-bar guy, Kuechly’s a “volume candy giver”).<\/p>\n
Jansen: “So, then you come home, you get the mini-bye, we’ll have all gained 10 pounds from all the candy we’ve eaten over Halloween break, and then we get the Broncos. So they were just a couple of plays away last year from playing in the Super Bowl.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Second quarter Week 5 \u2014 ByeWeek 6 \u2014 at PhiladelphiaWeek 7 \u2014 Tampa BayWeek 8 \u2014 at Green…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18789,4,450,451,829,3,1138,452,453],"class_list":["post-643768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-app-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-news","tag-spotlight","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}