Panthers guard Robert Hunt made Pro Bowl in 2024. He has bigger goals this season
As you scan the Carolina Panthers offense, looking for the kinds of players who could possibly elevate this team from five wins in 2024 to a playoff contender in 2025, it’s natural to think of the players who handle the ball: Bryce Young. Chuba Hubbard. Tetairoa McMillan.
But the best player on offense is also the one who best blots out the sun: 6-foot-6, 323-pound offensive guard Robert Hunt.
Hunt plays an obscure position, but he plays it so well that the Panthers plucked him away from the Miami Dolphins in 2024 with a five-year, $100-million contract. In his first season at Carolina, the Panthers offensive line improved dramatically and Hunt was the only Carolina offensive player to make the Pro Bowl (originally an alternate, he later got in after one of the players ahead of him reached the Super Bowl).
But Hunt has even bigger goals. Not just the playoffs this year. Not just more Pro Bowls and a Super Bowl ring eventually, although he wants all of that, too.
“Eventually, I want to get a gold jacket,” Hunt said, referring to the piece of clothing bestowed on all members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Those are big dreams, but Hunt is a big man who has already accomplished a lot he wasn’t supposed to. The youngest of six children, Hunt was a two-star recruit at Burkeville High School in Texas, where hissenior class only had 18 people in it.
“Burkeville, where I went to high school at, is a small, country, rural town,” Hunt said. “There’s no stoplight — just a four-way stop sign. You blink, you’ve gone right through it. We’ve got a Family Dollar and a gas station, and that’s about it.”
While Burkeville’s population is around 1,800, Hunt clarified that he is actually from an even smaller nearby Texas town called Wiergate (population 570). All of this is in East Texas, not far from the Louisiana border. Hunt had two scholarship offers coming out of college — one from Houston and one from the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns (the college that also happens to be the alma mater of Jake Delhomme).
Hunt took the offer from Louisiana and packed for college, 150 miles away. It was there in Lafayette, La., that he blossomed, making all-conference twice and ending up as a second-round NFL draft pick for the Dolphins in 2020.
“If I had gone to a big high school, maybe I would have been a five-star guy,” Hunt said. “But God blessed me and put me where He needed me to be. And I worked my butt off.”
For the Panthers, Hunt returns for an offensive line that has stayed completely intact both with its starters and its top reserves — a rarity in the NFL. Hunt played every offensive snap in 2024 for the first 16 games before missing the 17th and final game for an O-line that gave up 65 sacks in 2023 but only 36 in 2024. It also paved the way for Hubbard to rush for a career-high 1195 yards and 10 rushing TDs. In 2024, Hunt himself allowed only 2.5 sacks for the season and was called for holding only once.
Still, he knows he can get better, as do his coaches.
Said Dave Canales, the Panthers head coach: “Robert is amazing. The size, the talent, the quickness, the flexibility. He’s a really intelligent guy. And he’ll be the first one to come up here and tell you there are technique things that he wants to work on: Being really specific with his hand placement. Keeping his weight back (when blocking). He’s such a big, dominant force that he can get away with kind of just mauling guys and covering them up. But if you play with technique and you have all that power and athleticism, that’s when you really take the next step.”
That’s what Hunt wants to do this year, as he shoots for another Pro Bowl and for the Panthers offense to take another step, preferably behind a block from No. 50.
“I play this game to be good, man,” Hunt said. “That’s really the only way to play it.”
