CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you needed any more evidence that the Carolina Panthers think something is wrong with this team, Friday morning provided it.

At 10:14 a.m., the morning after a 27-19 loss to Green Bay on “Thursday Night Football,” the Carolina Panthers issued a stark press release.

The news was jarring: Defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero had just been fired, right in the middle of the season, as had defensive passing game coordinator Jonathan Cooley. Defensive line coach Todd Wash was promoted to interim defensive coordinator and will call the defensive plays, the Panthers said. After losing two games in five days, Carolina (3-4) next plays a home game against Denver (5-2) on Nov. 8.

Firing Evero only 41% of the way through the season was a radical move, albeit one that was arguably a couple of years overdue.

I don’t mind the Panthers doing it now.

I question why they didn’t do it sooner.

Evero, 45, has been in Charlotte since 2023, hired originally by Frank Reich as the Panthers' DC after being one of the nine people who interviewed for the head-coaching job Reich eventually got.

Owner David Tepper quickly regretted that move. Reich lasted only 11 games, going 1-10, before getting fired before his first season was complete.

But Evero survived that tumult. He also survived the Panthers hiring head coach Dave Canales in January 2024.

Canales retained Evero in the same job. The coach routinely stuck by him when Evero’s unit finished worst in the NFL in almost every conceivable defensive category (2024) or would play a horrid version of “prevent” defense on the L.A. Rams’ final, game-winning TD drive that lost them a playoff thriller at home (January of this year).

It was that playoff game, incidentally, that I thought was Evero’s biggest defensive play-calling mistake. He was timid. He had his corners playing so far off the Rams receivers that Matthew Stafford just dinked and dunked the ball right down the field, ruining what would have been Carolina’s biggest win of the past decade.

Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what the reason for Canales’ loyalty to Evero was.

Even at their best, Evero’s Panther defenses were mediocre statistically. Sometimes, behind closed doors, players would complain that his schemes were too complicated.

Given that Canales didn’t hire Evero to begin with, the fact that he kept giving him so much responsibility was unusual. Most head coaches like to bring in their own guys.

Firing Evero only seven games into a 17-game season means that the Panthers brass — as Tepper, general manager Dan Morgan and Canales, who all would have signed off on this — had finally gotten fed up.

Tepper, remember, said before the season that this team had a better roster and looked more like a playoff team than last year’s, which won the NFC South with an 8-9 record. So that was the expectation, rather than a 3-4 record with a bunch of difficult games remaining.

This season has been an up-and-down one for the defense, which played well in wins over Atlanta and Philadelphia but had one of the franchise’s poorest days ever in Week 1, allowing a startling 59 points to the Chicago Bears.

Then, last Sunday, a 1-5 Tampa Bay team waltzed into Bank of America Stadium and clobbered Carolina, 43-13.

The common denominator in both the Bears and Bucs games: giving up more than 250 rushing yards.

Evero’s defenses have done similar things a lot of times. In his tenure with Carolina, the team has given up 200-plus rushing yards 12 times.

The Panthers entered Thursday night’s game against the Packers last in the league in rushing yards allowed per game, although then they bounced back by holding Green Bay to only 66 yards on 26 carries.

Thursday was far from the defense’s worst performance of the year, I’ll say that.

Jordan Love threw for 288 yards and three TDs, but the defense also forced two turnovers. And the D gave Carolina a chance to tie the game with a late defensive stop, despite being down to their fifth and sixth cornerbacks due to injuries.

So this was an overall thing, not a “look what happened Thursday” thing.

Lots of questions remain, though, including these two:

If Evero was on such a tight leash, why not just part ways with him after last season concluded? Or after the 2024 season?

Why did Carolina extend Evero before the 2025 season — after that historically bad season in 2024 — in the first place?

Following the Rams playoff loss in January, Canales said of Evero: “He’s got my full support.”

But things change in the NFL. And on Friday, they certainly did.

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