NFL insider on the 'Frankenstein's monster' that the Carolina Panthers have become

CBS Sports reporter Jonathan Jones hits the Panthers hard over their decline since he 2015 season.

Tim Weaver | 5 Hours Ago

LANDOVER, MARYLAND - OCTOBER 20: Carolina Panthers players take a knee while Raheem Blackshear #3 of the Carolina Panthers is attended to by team medical staff during the third quarter against the Washington Commanders at Northwest Stadium on October 20, 2024 in Landover, Maryland. / (Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty Images)

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Carolina Panthers

Halloween doesn't arrive until Thursday, but if you feel like watching a horror show you can tune into today's game between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos, who are favored by 11 points. It's rare for a betting line in any NFL game to be that lopsided, but these Panthers are a special case - and they're also decimated by injuries right now.

Whatever short-term problems the team may have due to injuries, they're nothing compared to the long-term mismanagement that's turned what was a competitive roster as recently as the first half of the 2018 season into a long-running nightmare that now qualifies as an all-time bad team. The worst thing about it is that fans aren't even angry anymore. They just don't care. Watch CBS Sports NFL insider/Panthers reporter Jonathan Jones break down just how far this franchise has fallen.

Jonathan Jones on the monstrously bad Panthers

Remember the 2015 Carolina Panthers?

Those were the days 😫 @jjones9 pic.twitter.com/X5PFJjlHCT
— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) October 27, 2024

While it's appropriate for the season, Jones' comparison is a little bit off. For those that know the novel, Frankenstein's creature was assembled from the parts of several different corpses. He had the strength of several grown men, as well as a high intelligence. This Panthers team has none of that and is more like a dessicated zombie that's lost too many body parts to effectively chase anybody down and eat their brains, so it's slowly starving to death-after-death.

So, who's to blame for the ongoing horror? A lot of it has to fall on the team's last two general managers, Scott Fitterer and Marty Hurney. Their combined string of bad decisions at quarterback are what has sunk this team more than anything else, but the way they built the rest of the roster wasn't a whole lot better.

New head coach Dave Canales and general manager Dan Morgan have shown some promise, though. They will need time to turn this ship around - beginning with an aggressive sell-off at the NFL trade deadline. A lot more will go into it, but stockpiling picks for the 2025 and 2026 draft-classes is the best thing they can do to begin rebuilding this team in earnest.