Panthers Fan Bullish For Future, But Not For Week 1

This week we asked fans of the Carolina Panthers two simple questions:

1. Are you confident the Panthers are headed in the right direction?
2. Do you expect them to beat the Bears?

In short, these were questions about the short term and long term success of the team. It’s hard to look at the work that general manager Dan Morgan and head coach Dave Canales have done and say that this team isn’t improving. It’s a short stretch from there to saying that you expect things to keep improving in the future. So it’s not surprising that a whopping 80% of Panthers fans are confident the team is heading in the right direction.

It’s all hard to look at where the team today came from and say that you expect any sort of success in the near future. Even with last season’s admirable showing in the playoffs against the Los Angeles Rams, saying you expect the Panthers to beat the Ben Johnson and Caleb Williams led Chicago Bears seems like a stretch. Never mind that Johnson is a younger and more recent head coach hire than Canales and that Williams is a younger and less experienced player than Bryce Young. Do mind that the Panthers have yet to translate a hot December/January into an even mildly competent September.

That’s how you get only 45% of fans expecting the Panthers to win their first home opener in years. Plenty more probably think they could win, but expecting a positive result is a whole different ball game. We probably could have gotten a stronger result in favor of the Panthers if we asked people if they thought favoring the Bears -3 over the Panthers was overly generous towards Chicago. But that’s not what I’m interested in.

I’m interested in the difference between people thinking things are going to be alright eventually and expecting them to be good now. I’m curious to see the drop in confidence after a Panthers loss on Sunday through extremely familiar events in spite of these seemingly low expectations from fans. I guess we only have a few more hours to wait to see how this particular cookie crumbles.