Dave Canales on Panthers starters playing vs. Bills in preseason: 'That's my hope'

Carolina Panthers head coach Dave Canales plans to have his starters play in the team’s final preseason game of the year against the Buffalo Bills on Saturday. While speaking to reporters on Thursday, Canales said having his starters play on Saturday will help them get ready for their regular-season routine.

“My hope is to get the starters out there early in the game, get them some exposure,” Canales said. “The importance of it to me is how valuable the night before prep is. Waking up in the morning, we have a 1:00 kick, we got a lot of those this year. So just the body readiness. The plan behind this camp was to practice early so that we can have that readiness going into the season where most of our kicks are at 1:00 except for a couple of out-of-time-zone things, and of course, we go to Germany.

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“This is a great opportunity to go through their pregame routines with each other, to have the communications on the sidelines as we go into the first drive there and just gather information. Talk, ‘This is how it’ll feel like.’ So, I love this opportunity for the guys and they’re excited about it.”

The starters didn’t play in the first two preseason games as over 30 players were inactive each week. And while it’s understandable to not play the starters in the preseason, Canales explained why he held them out.

Dave Canales on why he didn’t play starters in first two preseason games

“Honestly, it was really just about the grasp of the system,” Canales explained. “Going back to that, talking about the confident play. I was open to playing them in the first one. I was open to playing in the second one. We had that great, great week of work against the Jets and we had a couple of guys, we knew we were going to get back this week. So it was like, why don’t we wait another week to get a stronger group to put out there.”

“But, again, watching the practices, watching those first couple of games and seeing, OK, it feels like we have a great grasp of what we’re doing now, so that we can go out there and be confident. I didn’t want to go out there and just kind of stumble around stuff as we’re still figuring out our schemes and all that. But for this week, “I’d love to get them sweaty. I’d love to get them the full work of coming play in and play out.”

Saturday will mark the first time fans will see quarterback Bryce Young in Canales’ offensive scheme. Canales said he’s not sure how much the former Alabama Crimson Tide star will play, but backup QB Andy Dalton is expected to play after missing the last two games with a quad injury.