CHARLOTTE — This is it. Everything the Panthers have done this season, every offseason workout, every practice, comeback win, challenging loss, and franchise-changing victory in 2025 has led to this game. If the Carolina Panthers go into Tampa Bay and win on Saturday, a place they haven't won since 2017, they'll leave as NFC South champions—a feat not accomplished since 2015.

"It's a true championship moment, shirts and hats games," coach Dave Canales preached this week. "It's what you work so hard for all year. It's right in front of us on prime time football in Tampa. It's going to be fantastic. We're excited about it, and that's enough. That's enough for the guys to understand this is your shot. This is the last shot we have."

Technically, even with a loss on Saturday, the Panthers could still make it into the playoffs if the Atlanta Falcons beat the Saints on Sunday. But Carolina coaches and players aren't focusing on that backdoor possibility; they're only on how they can control their own destiny, so we won't spend time on it in this piece either.

There are still plenty of other areas of this game to dive into, from unlocking a certain part of the offense to borrowing from what went well in Week 16, controlling field position, and more. So with that in mind, here is one final regular season five things to watch.

Will Bucs copy the Seahawks coverage strategy?

The NFL is a copycat league. If something works for one team, another will likely try to copy it in their own game plan—presumably, anyway, but more on that later.

The Seahawks only played standard man coverage 13.3 percent of the time on Sunday against the Panthers, but followed receivers enough on the boundaries to slow down Carolina's passing game in the area of the field where Bryce Young has had the most success.

"A lot of credit to the Seahawks for mixing some things up and making some looks challenging," said Canales this week.

Young finished with just 54 passing yards. Now the question becomes, will the Buccaneers try to copy the strategy? Tampa Bay has, for reference, played standard man 26.1 percent of the time this season.

"I'll speak personally, when something is within our scheme that we can do, that another team has success with those are certainly things that we should see," offered Canales to the possibility.

"So there are elements of what the Seahawks did that the Bucs already have. I just know that coach Bowles, the way that he's training his defense, the way that he tries to attack and do different things, and just watching film of the Bucs, I'm sure they're going to lean on the core of what they do, and they're going to ask their guys to execute.

"And that's really what it comes down to, and we're all very similar in that regard. None of us are going to completely abandon our game plan, to make things completely different, but there will be wrinkles."

Tetairoa McMillan, who has 66 receptions for 929 yards and seven touchdowns, has faced a tight window on 19.8 percent of his routes, which is the 17th-highest rate amongst qualifying receivers. In Week 16 against the Bucs, McMillan hauled in six receptions for 73 yards and a score; two of those for 33 yards, and his touchdown, were against tight-man coverage outside the numbers.

"That first game was a little different just because the refs that week let us play a little bit more. They're a little bit more physical," explained McMillan. "I feel like I got to play to that, kind of similar to what they gave me the first game, just kind of carry it over the same way."

One of the ways the Panthers found success against the Bucs defense in that game was by sending the rookie deep, which he did at his third-highest rate of the season. Which brings us to our next point…

How do the Panthers find explosives?

After the Seahawks game, in which Young didn't have a pass completion longer than 8 yards (and none more than 6 air yards), Canales told reporters the group had to meet their minimum explosive marker to find more success this week.

"We want to find that productivity down the field," the coach said. "The explosive element has led to a lot of our success in recent weeks. To come out of the game with two explosives, that's something we got to improve upon."

To Canales' point, there have been five games this season where Young had two or more completions of 20-plus air yards. The Panthers have won four of those five games. The Bucs' Week 16 game was one of those wins.

Young has been particularly effective on deep balls to the boundaries, where he is above league average. On passes of 20-plus yards to the right side of the ball, Young is averaging a 100.5 passer rating (league average 80.3). To the left side of the field, he is averaging a 107.6 apasser rating (79.2). He has targeted outside the numbers on 42.4 percent of his attempts this season, the fifth-highest rate in the league.

The Bucs game in Week 16 was one of those four wins when hitting completions of 20-plus air yards. That week, Young went 2-of-3 deep for 56 yards and a touchdown. He was particularly efficient—again—outside the numbers, completing 10 of his 16 such attempts for 116 yards and both of his touchdowns.

Can Bryce Young use his legs?

As the Panthers have continued to evolve, tweak, and craft their offense this season, an aspect that has begun to pay dividends is Bryce Young's running ability. The last four games, in particular, have seen Canales up Young's time outside the pocket on designed rollouts. That, in turn, as well as Young's own trust in himself, has seen his scramble yardage go up significantly.

This is the most rushing attempts Young has had in his career, with 52 so far. Week 17 against the Seahawks saw him rush the ball nine times, the most in a single game in his career. It hasn't been for as many yards, but it has arguably been a more efficient use. He's picked up 16 first downs with his legs thus far, already more than 2024, and with a chance to surpass his 2023 total (18).

When Canales and his staff arrived, they knew this was a part of Young's game that could be tapped into more.

"We knew he's an athlete," offensive coordinator Brad Idzik said this week. "You watch him manipulate the pocket, the quickness, and I think he challenges himself to keep his eyes down the field, just like you would hope really any quarterback would for as long as he can."

But Idzik points to these last few weeks when it's really come alive. It was an answer, he explained, to defenses trying to shut down the run game with Rico Dowdle and Chuba Hubbard that hit a stride through the middle of the season.

"Anytime you're running the ball well, I think, the defense starts to shrink. We actually emphasized it the last couple of weeks of we want to widen the field. We want to make sure that they have to defend the whole width of the grass," Idzik said, pointing to a 9-yard run Young had in the last game against Tampa that put the Panthers in the red zone. They scored a touchdown three plays later. The scoring play saw Young scramble out of a sack and find Ja'Tavion Sanders in the back of the end zone.

"So that's another element of us widening the field, making sure that those guys can't start to collapse the box on us on our rundowns…all that stuff helps expand that defense and make sure that they got to play laterally as well, so they can't just fit their gaps, and Bryce has been a huge element of that."

Somewhat adjacent to this subject is the Panthers' employment of the QB sneak with Mitchell Evans. Carolina used the play for the first time against Seattle with success, as the rookie tight end (and former high school quarterback) picked up the fourth-and-1. Now that it's on tape, the Bucs will have to prepare for the possibility, as well as the bootlegs and handoffs the Panthers have been using.

And in Charlotte, the Panthers are preparing Evans for the possibility of using the play again on Saturday.

"(Mitchell's done a good job of protecting the ball and making sure his pad level's right, and finding the crease," Idzik said. "You don't want to run right into perhaps their best plugger up front. You've got a guy like (Bucs defensive lineman) Vita Vea, right, and you want to make sure that you understand, 'OK, where is he stunting, what gap is he fitting?'

"You want to make sure you find a little crease so you can keep your pad level down and get the yard we need. But Mitch did a great job of that over the last handful of weeks, just making sure that, invoking confidence in Dave to call it."

Controlling the Bucs cannons

In all this talk about the Panthers' offense, lest we forget what kind of Bucs offense Carolina will have to face. With their full "krewe" back on the field in these final weeks, Baker Mayfield has had a litany of weapons to choose from.

"Different types of guys, a true basketball team, if you will," said Dave Canales of the group this week. "They got Mike Evans, and they have a bunch of guys that can do different things. They have versatility. Chris Godwin had a big game (against Miami). There's a lot of weapons that they can use: the two backs, certainly the tight end."

The Panthers were able to hold Mike Evans to five receptions for 31 yards in Week 16, a fairly pedestrian day for the All-Pro receiver. He was still able to pull in a touchdown and draw a defensive pass interference call, proving he can still change the game even without gaudy numbers.

Against the Dolphins, the group helped Mayfield put up the most passing yards for any quarterback in Week 17 (33-of-44 for 346 and two touchdowns). Chris Godwin and Jalen McMillan each pulled in seven receptions for 108 and 114 yards, respectively.

Continued Canales, "I'm sure as they continue to pile these weeks together, having their guys back, just getting that rhythm, finding that type of thing, that's going to be, the consistency is going to be the challenge for them, to get that rolling, and we got to be aware of how they're trying to use these guys lately."

While it's only been two weeks since the Panthers saw this group, it would be easy to assume not much would change in the Bucs approach. And to an extent, that's true. But Jaycee Horn knows it would be naive not to expect any tweaks.

"I'm sure they're going to have counters on stuff we did from last game, so we know you're going to see new stuff. But we just got to fall back on our technique, fall back on our training, and just go play what the game plan is and go out there and execute it."

One of the Bucs' tactics two weeks ago was to altogether avoid Horn. The Pro Bowler didn't see a target all game. That choice means targeting Mike Jackson instead. He gave up an early touchdown to Evans, but then followed it up with three passes defensed. Jackson leads the league now in that category with 19 passes defensed, and is two away from setting a Panthers franchise record in that stat.

It's a pick your poison situation, between the corner that leads the league in PBUs (Jackson) and the corner second in the league in interceptions (Horn, with five).

"I try to go into the game like I'm going to get every target, just to stay ready," said Horn, "but they've been targeting him, and he's shutting it down, so we're both going to just keep trying to do what we do at a high level."

The kickoff complex

This section was originally titled "Can Trevor Etienne help change field position." The rookie has been averaging 23.6 yards per return, with a long of 45, and the Bucs have the 30th-ranked (so third-worst) kickoff coverage in the league, allowing an average of 28.2 yards per return.

But the latter part of that statement delves into a lot of complexity that factors in more than just Etienne.

In recent weeks, the Bucs have almost exclusively kicked out of the back of the end zone, resulting in touchbacks. Todd Bowles told reporters this week that it was intentional, largely because Tampa didn't trust its kickoff coverage.

"It wasn't getting done the way we wanted to get it done and the next resort to that is to kick it into the end zone and start at the 35 as opposed to midfield," Bowles explained on Monday. "It minimizes the strategy."

This wasn't Tampa Bay's strategy all year. In fact, Chase McLaughlin is near the middle of the league in percentage of kickoffs that have gone into the end zone for a touchback, 21.5 percent thus far. But in Week 16 against the Panthers, all five of the Panthers drives that came off a Bucs kickoff started as a touchback. Two of those drives led to points. Against the Dolphins, the Bucs kicked off four times: two were touchbacks, one was an unsuccessful onside kick, and one was returned for 47 yards that set up a field goal drive.

The challenge for Carolina now is to remain vigilant, and not be lulled to sleep at the prospect of only getting touchbacks.

"You have to be ready for that, even if the kicker is in his kind of like touchback alignment, have to be ready to go," said special teams coordinator Tracy Smith. "You never know what's going to happen to the conditions of that particular kick.

"You have to be ready on all the special teams plays for all the possible outcomes. If you've had four or five in a game, the guys kind of get in that mode, so that's the last reminder on the way out there is, like, 'This is the one because of this or that' or some kind of reason to keep the guys, kind of the bell moving in front of the cat. You got to keep them entertained and then say, you never know, because you never know."

On the Panthers side, Ryan Fitzgerald has re-employed the dirty kickoffs that was confounding teams earlier in the season. Against the Bucs in Week 16, Fitzgerald forced the Bucs to start four of their six drives via kickoff inside the 35-yard line, including two inside the 16-yard line—only one of those four drives ending in points.

The Panthers' kickoff coverage unit is the second-best in the league, holding teams to an average of 22.8 yards per return.

This all boils down to one thing: in a game likely to be closely contested, field position will be at a premium, and how each team handles kickoffs will be worth watching.