\n WHAT WENT RIGHT IN 2025<\/p>\n
It appears the Panthers found themselves a kicker.<\/p>\n
Fitzgerald won the preseason competition with journeyman Matthew Wright, and he flourished.<\/p>\n
Beginning with his walk-off against Dallas, he showed he has the kind of nerve you don’t expect from a rookie. He also hit game winners against the Falcons, Packers, and Bucs, in a season in which the Panthers made late-game runs a thing.<\/p>\n
Since 2000, only seven rookies in the league have had as many as three game-winning kicks, and he matched Dan Bailey (2011) for the lead with four.<\/p>\n
He was also effective on kickoffs, able to handle a new skill to strategically use the “dirty kicks” early to help the Panthers rank near the top in kickoff coverage (third in average opposing starting field position after kickoff return).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WHAT WENT RIGHT IN 2025 It appears the Panthers found themselves a kicker. Fitzgerald won the preseason competition…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2075],"tags":[79,235,260,2567,7,81,6,236],"class_list":{"0":"post-770137","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-carolina-panthers","8":"tag-app-news","9":"tag-carolina","10":"tag-carolina-panthers","11":"tag-carolinapanthers","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-nfl","15":"tag-panthers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116117361644241763","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}