Dave Canales on Panthers’ road-heavy start to 2025: ‘Every game is important’
The NFL schedule makers didn’t do the Carolina Panthers a whole lot of favors with their 2025 regular-season slate.
Carolina will be on the road for three of the team’s first four games in Year 2 of the Dave Canales era. The squad also won’t host its home opener in Charlotte until Week 3, and Canales’ crew won’t get to rest until a Week 14 bye.
So, if Canales — who has been dubbed an “optimist bully” by Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield — wasn’t feeling too excited about the order of his opponents, no one would really blame him.
But, in typical Canales fashion, the Panthers’ head coach is focusing on what he thinks are overlooked advantages built into the season calendar.
“I just always look at road games as an opportunity for us to grow,” Canales said Thursday. “I think the thing that people miss, that happens when you do travel, is you become closer as a team. …You travel together, you’re in the hotel together, the meetings, the in-betweens, guys will find dinner right before night meetings. So I’ve always seen those opportunities as a chance for us to bond and kind of grow closer. The fact that it happens early in the season is a good thing. As we figure out who we are, we’re going to have the core of what we’re doing from an Xs-and-Os standpoint, but we’re going to see our team emerge.
“And to go and play in somebody else’s stadium, we talk to the guys like, ‘We’re all we got, we’re all we need.’ This is our group right here and you got to stay together. The energy has to come from our bench, for the guys playing, and to support each other that way.
“And then of course, on the flip side of that, you’ve got a lot of road games early on, so that means we’re going to have more home games as the season goes on, and that’s when we can bring our show home and show who we are to our fan base and get them excited about what we’re doing.”
The Panthers will face the Jaguars in Jacksonville in Week 1 and the Cardinals in Arizona in Week 2.
Both opponents had their struggles last season, similar to the Panthers, and their relatively comparable outlooks could help Carolina get off to a strong start while blitzing through an early road slate. Last season, the Panthers defeated the Cardinals, 36-30, in overtime, off a walk-off touchdown run by Chuba Hubbard.
Following those two road matchups, the Panthers will host the Atlanta Falcons at Bank of America Stadium. The two NFC South rivals tend to play each other closely, no matter their respective situations, and the home opener could serve as a great opportunity for Carolina to get a leg up in the division race.
Last season, the teams split the annual two-game series, but the Panthers capped off the campaign with a thrilling 44-38 win over Atlanta on the road.
“Every game is important,” Canales said. “We’re going to approach that first one just like we will the rest of them. … This is a new team. Every year is a different team. Guys are different — the guys that were rookies last year, they come in with a different mindset this season. So I really don’t know what our team is, who our team is — but we have opportunity, especially early on, to kind of figure that out some on the road.”
Last season, Canales and the Panthers were kept out of the national spotlight.
After failing to secure a prime-time matchup in 2024, the team will travel to San Francisco to face the 49ers on Monday Night Football in Week 12.
“I just love the opportunities to play those types of games,” Canales said. “There’s a couple of extra cameras, and you get to play under the lights and play against a great opponent, and those are the types of games that we need to become who we are. And the challenge is to go on the road, go across the country, and really feel the high-stakes games, as we build this and compete to win the division. The hope is that we are working ourselves into the mentality of, ‘This is just another game.’ We go about our preparation and our work the same way, so we can go out there and just play our best.”
The Panthers will host Mayfield and the Buccaneers (Week 16) and Seattle Seahawks (Week 17) late in the season. They’ll then finish up the campaign in a quick turnaround season-finale rematch against Tampa Bay.
Canales, who served as the Tampa Bay offensive coordinator in 2023, spent the majority of his career working with the Seahawks. But Pete Carroll and his staff have since moved to Las Vegas to guide the rebuilding Raiders.
Despite his ties to Tampa Bay and Seattle, Canales says he is trying to treat every game the same way.
“Honestly, I love every game,” Canales said with a huge smile. “And so I think there are just such great teachable moments from each game. And my message to the team is going to be consistent. It’s going to be like, ‘No game is bigger than the other one.’
“And if we can make them all big games — they all matter, this is all going to create our team, these are all the best opportunities that we have as a team and then individually as players — like, this is the best game you have.”
This story was originally published May 15, 2025 at 1:32 PM.
