Jonathon Brooks hasn't had a normal offseason since he entered the league. Carolina traded up with the Colts to grab him 46th overall in the 2024 draft, betting on a Texas back who'd flashed first-round talent before tearing his ACL in his final college season. He was worth the wait for exactly 3 games. In Week 14 of his rookie year, Brooks went down again with a second ACL tear in the same knee in less than 13 months, a gut-punch that limited him to 9 carries for 22 yards as a rookie and eventually landed him on the physically unable to perform list for all of 2025.
The numbers behind the workload question that's followed Brooks since college.
That stat is the whole story of Brooks' career so far: since he left high school, he's cleared 30 carries in a season exactly once. Between the college ACL tear, the rookie-year ACL tear, and the lost 2025 season on PUP, Carolina still has almost no live-game evidence of what a healthy, featured version of Brooks actually looks like. He was the first running back off the board in his draft class for a reason, but reasons don't carry weight until he's actually out there taking hits and popping runs against NFL defenses again.
So when Brooks strapped on pads for his first real training camp practice this week, it mattered more than a typical July rep would. Panthers head coach Dave Canales, who'd already been complimentary of Brooks' burst and pass-catching during OTAs, gave his most pointed endorsement yet after watching him go live.
Dave Canales' reaction after Brooks' first padded practice of camp.
"He looks like the guy I remember" is a small sentence carrying a lot of weight for a player who's had his knee rebuilt twice. It's not a stat line, and it's not a guarantee he holds up over a 17-game season, but for a team that's watched Brooks rehab in silence for a year and a half, a coach saying he passed the eye test in pads is the first real checkpoint.
Carolina still has Chuba Hubbard entrenched as the lead back, and camp battles with AJ Dillon and Trevor Etienne will decide how much of a workload Brooks actually sees behind him. But a healthy, explosive Brooks changes the math on that backfield entirely — he was viewed as a potential feature back before the injuries piled up, and this is the first camp where the Panthers get to find out if that guy still exists. The next checkpoint is whether he can stack padded practices, and eventually preseason snaps, without setback.