NFL Preseason Week 1: Winners, Losers, and Overreactions

Last Updated on agosto 10, 2026 10:41 pm by Erwin Noguera

Carolina 33, Arizona 30, decided on the last play of the night in Canton.

An undrafted third-string rookie from Georgia Tech led a 16-play, 65-yard drive, and then scrambled into the end zone from five yards out with no time on the clock. At the other end of the field, a third-round rookie quarterback spent the first half looking like the best player in the building.

Preseason football does not count. This one still told us a few things.

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WINNERS

Carson Beck

The best player on the field for the entire first half, and it was not close.

Beck finished 15 of 19 for 188 yards with a touchdown, no interceptions and a 125.4 passer rating in his first NFL action. The numbers are good. The way he got them is better.

He did everything asked of him and did all of it well; dump-offs when the coverage dictated, short bullets inside the rhythm of play-action, intermediate throws on time and on target, and passes with enough velocity to find teammates accurately outside the numbers. The touchdown was a back-corner fade dropped into a bucket for Simi Fehoko.

The deep balls were the beauty. Beck launched them with the direction and timing that made him a four-star recruit out of high school, and he layered in pump fakes to bait defenders into biting on double moves down the sideline. That is not rookie-level game management. That is a quarterback running an offence.

Mike LaFleur asked for a lot in his own first game as an NFL head coach. Beck handled it like someone who had seen the problems before.

Haynes King

Third on the depth chart, undrafted, and the reason Carolina won.

King entered and immediately changed the game. He fired quicker and with more conviction than the quarterback ahead of him, kept the offence moving, and finished 21 of 34 for 180 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions, plus 39 rushing yards.

Then he closed it. Sixteen plays, 65 yards, and a five-yard touchdown run on third-and-goal with the clock at zero.

He was not flawless; he overthrew a wide-open Jimmy Horn Jr. in the end zone just before halftime. But he looked like the more comfortable passer of Carolina’s two options, and his mobility is a genuine weapon rather than a bailout. There is an argument that King is stylistically the closest match on the roster to Bryce Young, which makes his climb up the depth chart more than a preseason curiosity.

AJ Dillon

Three carries, and he made all of them count.

Dillon caught an 18-yard pass to move Carolina deep into the red zone, then bulled in from a yard out for the Panthers’ first score. He added a 13-yard run on the next drive before King took over and Carolina went pass-heavy.

This was the most Dillon has shown on an NFL field since his final season in Green Bay in 2023. Injuries have taken most of what came after that, and he is buried on Carolina’s depth chart. It was still good to see.

John Metchie III and Ja’Seem Reed

Carolina’s receiver room is a genuine scrum, and these two made the most of the reps.

Metchie led the Panthers in receiving with three catches for 38 yards, including a 20-yard catch-and-run that pushed Carolina past midfield and set up their first trip into scoring range. Reed caught the first of King’s two touchdowns, slipping underneath coverage on play-action and into the end zone untouched.

Neither separated from the pack. Both did enough to stay in the conversation.

LOSERS

Kenny Pickett

Pickett started and looked exactly like the quarterback his first four NFL seasons suggested.

The opening snaps were tentative; he closed in on tight end Ja’Tavion Sanders for two completions before a sack ended the drive. He settled eventually and led a touchdown drive that benefited from the only genuine run-pass balance Carolina showed all half.

It was fine. He is a backup playing with backups. The problem is that the third-stringer who replaced him was visibly better, and Pickett came to Carolina to be the reliable veteran behind Bryce Young. One preseason game does not cost him that job. It does mean he now has to defend it.

Kei’Trel Clark

The single worst play of the night belonged to Arizona’s cornerback.

With Carolina buried inside its own one-yard line and Pickett’s offence going nowhere, Clark committed a defensive pass interference penalty that handed the Panthers a free escape. In a game decided by three points on the final snap, plays like that are the difference.

Arizona’s Defence

Thirty-three points allowed, and a 16-play drive surrendered with the game on the line.

Preseason defences are patchwork units playing vanilla coverages, and no conclusions about September should be drawn from this. But allowing a 65-yard march to end the game, against a third-string quarterback, is not the way LaFleur wanted his first night to finish.

Jimmy Horn Jr.

Horn became one of King’s favourite targets in the second half, which should have been the story. Instead, he dropped a pass, and King’s accuracy when targeting him was inconsistent.

In a receiver competition this crowded, drops are the fastest way to lose ground.

OVERREACTIONS

“Carson Beck should start Week 1”

He was outstanding. He was also playing against second- and third-string defenders in a vanilla preseason scheme.

Jacoby Brissett signed a reworked $15.5 million deal to be Arizona’s starter and is not losing that job in August. The realistic competition Beck is in is for QB2 against eighth-year veteran Gardner Minshew, and camp reports before Thursday consistently flagged his ball placement on shorter timing routes as the weak point in his game.

One excellent half changes his trajectory. It does not change the depth chart.

“Haynes King is the backup now”

King won the game and looked better than Pickett. Both true.

He is also an undrafted rookie with one preseason appearance, and Dave Canales has two more preseason games plus joint practices before cutdown day on August 30. Carolina’s coaching staff has a full body of camp work to weigh against ninety entertaining minutes in Canton.

The honest version: King made this a competition. He has not won it.

“Carolina’s offence is fixed”

The Panthers scored 33 points without Bryce Young, Tetairoa McMillan, Jalen Coker, or Xavier Legette taking a snap.

Of the four receivers competing beneath McMillan and Coker, only David Moore even dressed. Carolina’s offensive line is still missing Taylor Moton and Ikem Ekwonu. What we watched was the bottom half of a depth chart beating the bottom half of another depth chart.

“AJ Dillon is back”

Three carries.

A Note on Our Own Prediction

Worth being straight about this. Our preview picked Carolina to win, which was right, and predicted a 20-17 scoreline while recommending the under. The final was 33-30, a 63-point shootout and one of the highest-scoring Hall of Fame Games in years.

We also wrote that Beck would show flashes and “throw at least one ball he should not,” because ball placement had been the consistent knock on him through camp. He went 15 of 19 with no interceptions and a 125.4 rating.

Preseason is difficult to handicap for exactly this reason. Third-string quarterbacks decide fourth quarters, and nothing about the regular season applies.

What Actually Carries Forward

Three things from Canton are worth remembering in September.

Arizona may have found something. Beck was drafted in the third round to develop behind Brissett. If he sustains this through the next two preseason games, the Cardinals have a genuine long-term answer at the position rather than a project, and that changes the timeline of their entire rebuild.

Carolina’s quarterback depth is better than expected. A team that spent the last two weeks losing players to injury just watched an undrafted rookie win a game. That is exactly the kind of depth a battered roster needs.

The receiver competitions are still open. Both squads left their most interesting candidates on the sideline. Legette and Moore for Carolina, and most of Arizona’s rotation. Preseason Week 1 on August 13-15 is where those battles actually start.

The real preseason begins Thursday.