Why Brian Burns and the Carolina Panthers’ pass rush are a key to team’s 2022 success

When Brian Burns rushes the quarterback for the Carolina Panthers in 2022, expect a couple of offensive players to greet him — and not nicely.

Burns is the 2022 Panthers’ only proven pass-rushing threat, and as such will be one of the season’s most important players. He’s going to need to beat double-teams, and someone else — Yetur Gross-Matos? Frankie Luvu? — is going to have to show that it’s not only Burns that opposing lines have to worry about.

A fourth-year defensive end for the Panthers, Burns was the only player on the squad selected as a Pro Bowl starter last season. And he showed up at training camp at 258 pounds this season, about 10-15 pounds heavier than his playing weight for his first three NFL seasons. The idea: Be able to run over an offensive tackle occasionally, instead of just trying to speed-rush around them.

“The more that he can include the power-rushing game into his game, it’ll change everything for him,” Panthers head coach Matt Rhule said of Burns, “because he’s such a great speed rusher. He can change tempos on guys, he can change levels on guys. But if he has the ability to put his foot in the ground and run you over, too? That’s what takes you from 9-10-11 sacks to 15-16-17 sacks.”

Burns hasn’t had a double-digit sack season yet in his NFL career, coming close with 9.0 the past two seasons. But this year he has lost his sackmate, Haason Reddick, who led the 2021 team with 11 sacks and parlayed that season into a monster contract with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Now it’s someone else’s turn to emerge as another pass-rushing threat for the Panthers. The easiest way to stop an offense is to not let the quarterback have any time to throw the ball, ideally while rushing only four people. The Panthers have had only mixed success at that recently. They ranked 15th in the NFL in sacks last season with 39, despite a blitz percentage that ranked third-highest in the league (33.7). But their defense as a whole was the team’s strength, ranking No. 2 in the NFL in total yards allowed.

In a perfect world for the Carolina defense, the sack number goes up, the blitz percentage goes down, and the Panthers’ number of turnovers forced — also mediocre last season — goes up, too. Burns — and the rest of the defensive line — will be a key to all of that.

This story was originally published September 9, 2022 at 5:50 AM with the headline "Why Brian Burns and the Carolina Panthers’ pass rush are a key to team’s 2022 success."

Scott Fowler

The Charlotte Observer

704-358-5136

Columnist Scott Fowler has written for The Charlotte Observer since 1994 and has earned 26 APSE awards for his sportswriting. He hosted The Observer’s podcast “Carruth,” which Sports Illustrated once named “Podcast of the Year.” Fowler also conceived and hosted the online series and podcast “Sports Legends of the Carolinas,” which featured 1-on-1 interviews with NC and SC sports icons and was turned into a book. He occasionally writes about non-sports subjects, such as the 5-part series “9/11/74,” which chronicled the forgotten plane crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 in Charlotte on Sept. 11, 1974. Support my work with a digital subscription