Stats don’t always tell the whole story, but they do a pretty good job of telling the story of the 2024 Panthers defense.
The Panthers allowed the most points and second-most yards of any team in league history, which explains why the team made a point of overhauling that side of the ball this offseason. They opened free agency by signing five defensive players and then picked up four more in the draft, but cornerback Jaycee Horn doesn’t think the changes completely turn the page from last year’s performance.
Horn said that the memory of what happened on the field should be used as inspiration rather than wiped from the memory banks.
“We don’t need to [be anything close](https://www.panthers.com/news/new-look-panthers-defense-determined-to-put-the-past-behind-them-by-working-now-jaycee-horn-derrick-brown) to that,” Horn said, via the team’s website. “You kind of want to throw it out of your mind because it’s a new season, but at the same time, it’s on the back of your mind too, because that should be really all the motivation you need to come back to camp. You don’t want nothing like that to happen again. It was a lot of injuries and a lot of stuff of that nature, but at the same time, the stat book is what it is. Like, we weren’t a good defense last year, so this year we just have to go even harder than we did last year. It’s out there, yeah. I mean you know it is what it is. You’ve just got to go about handling it the right way, bouncing back.”
Quarterback Bryce Young’s improvement in the second half of last season gave the Panthers something to build on offensively. Getting something similar on defense would be a step in the right direction in Carolina this season.
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