Get ready: Rookie WR Tetairoa McMillan about to have breakout day for Panthers
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Rookie WR Tetairoa McMillan leads Panthers in receiving yards through Week 3.
- McMillan has already become team’s WR1 but has yet to score his first NFL TD.
- Coach Dave Canales praises McMillan’s accountability and expects steady improvement.
The Tetairoa McMillan breakout game is coming.
You can feel it, can’t you? McMillan, the rookie Carolina Panthers wide receiver, oozes with potential. That’s been apparent on countless snaps in the Panthers’ first three games, as he has quickly assumed the role of WR1 and has led the Panthers (1-2) in reception yardage in every contest.
But — no touchdowns yet for McMillan. And no banner headline performances, either. His best game, the 100-yard effort against Arizona, came in a loss.
Still, there’s no doubt it’s coming. Thunderclouds are gathering in the distance. Lightning will strike. Maybe on Sunday at New England. Maybe not for a couple of weeks.
But T-Mac, as he prefers to be called, is like a soccer forward who keeps banging shots off the crossbar. When somebody is generating that many opportunities for himself, it’s only a matter of time. McMillan is going to have one of those 150-yard, two-touchdown games before too long.
Let’s look at one of his near-misses on Sunday, when the Panthers played a remarkably good game and whipped Atlanta, 30-0, in their home opener. In the third quarter, Bryce Young dropped back and under pressure lobbed the ball about 35 yards in McMillan’s general direction.
The problem was that McMillan was doing one thing on the play and Young was doing another.
“He did a great job,” Young said later, speaking of McMillan. “That was 100 percent on me. It was not a miscommunication. He did exactly what I said (to do), and I was thinking the wrong thing.”
McMillan was looking back over his right shoulder, but Young threw it behind him, on the left. So in about a half-second, McMillan pivoted while running full speed, glanced back over his left shoulder, barely got his right hand on the ball in the end zone — and couldn’t hold on.
“It touched my hand, so I think I should have caught that for sure,” McMillan said later in the locker room. And later, as he kept on with the self-criticism, he said: “I failed.”
To me, however, that “almost” play spoke to what the Panthers have just as much as McMillan’s fourth-down, 23-yard catch did in the first quarter, or the ball he leaped for and somehow reeled in to convert a crucial third down later in the game.
McMillan’s mid-play adjustment on that near-miss was real, and it was spectacular. And even though the play simply goes down as an incompletion, it provided more evidence that the player the Panthers got with the eighth overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft is going to be a force in this league.
It’s becoming more clear now that McMillan was, in fact, needed with that No. 8 overall pick. Xavier Legette is struggling mightily and has only eight yards receiving all season. The Panthers’ first-round draft pick in 2024 looks nothing like a WR1; Carolina seems hopeful he will become a decent WR2. Adam Thielen, while integral for the past two years, is 35 years old and has only two catches for 26 yards since he’s been traded to Minnesota.
So the Panthers were without a top-flight wide receiver before the NFL Draft, and now they have one.
Not that McMillan is perfect. He still sometimes has issues with the game’s physicality, and he’s not catching everything he gets his hands on yet.
Said Panthers head coach Dave Canales Monday of McMillan: “I’ve been very pleased with how he’s taking to the concepts, to the alignments, and the details of what we’re asking him. He’d come up here and tell you he’d love to have a few of those plays back… those bang-bang plays. And to give the Falcons players credit, they were making plays with their hands on the ball. And T-Mac feels like he can make those plays. And so I love that he takes accountability for those things, as an area for him to improve.”
Indeed, of McMillan’s eight targets on Sunday, he only caught three, for a total of 48 yards. McMillan pronounced his day “average.” For him, it was.
“I definitely feel like I had a lot of missed opportunities out there,” McMillan said.
But the fact that he can create those opportunities, means that it’s coming soon, and that he should improve steadily for the next several years.
McMillan is already good now. I can’t wait to see what he looks like in 2027.
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This story was originally published September 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
