Four teams. Four losses. The NFC South opened the 2026 season with a perfect record in the wrong direction.
The Panthers got run off their own field, losing 59-37 to the Bears at Bank of America Stadium. The Buccaneers lost 33-27 to the Bengals in Cincinnati. The Falcons managed 13 points in a 20-13 loss at Acrisure Stadium. And the Saints came the closest, falling 31-30 in overtime at Ford Field after a failed two-point conversion in the extra period.
Zero wins across one division on one Sunday.
The losses are not all the same
This is where the “entire division stinks” takes fall apart a little. Look at how these games actually went.
New Orleans went to Detroit, one of the toughest road environments in the league, and lost by a point in overtime. They went for the win rather than extending the game, which is the kind of aggression you want from a team that is supposed to be rebuilding. Nothing about that Sunday says the Saints are a disaster.
Tampa Bay lost by six on the road to a Bengals team that just put up 33. That is a normal NFL result, not an indictment.
Atlanta losing 20-13 at Pittsburgh is the most forgettable outcome of the bunch. Road game, defensive slog, 13 points. Bad, not alarming.
Then there is Carolina.
Carolina is the actual emergency
Giving up 59 points at home goes well beyond a bad day. That is a structural failure.
The Panthers scored 37 and still lost by 22, which means the offense did its job and the defense simply stopped existing. Chicago hung 59 on a team in its own building in Week 1, when defenses are typically at their most vanilla and the opponent has the least tape to work with.
If you are looking for the team in this division that should be legitimately panicked this morning, it is Carolina, and it is not close.
Here is the part that keeps this from being a real crisis: somebody in the NFC South is going to win the division, and the schedule is going to start handing out wins immediately.
Panthers and Falcons play each other in Week 2 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Barring a tie, one of them walks out at 1-1 and the 0-4 storyline dies before it can build momentum. Division play does that. These four teams play each other six times a year, which means the floor for the eventual winner is much higher than a single Sunday suggests.
The NFC South has produced a division champion with a losing record in recent memory, and nothing about Week 1 suggests this year will be dramatically different. The winner of this thing might get there at 9-8. Somebody still gets a home playoff game.
Do not over-read one week. Teams that start 0-1 make the playoffs every single season, and the specific losses here range from “concerning” to “completely normal.”
But do take Carolina seriously. A 59-point defensive collapse at home in September is the kind of thing that tends to repeat, and the Panthers now have to travel to Atlanta with the entire league watching to see whether that was a fluke or a preview.
The rest of the division? Come back in three weeks. The NFC South is going to spend the fall beating up on itself, and one of these four will look a lot better by November simply because the calendar demands it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.