Panthers interim head coach Steve Wilks isn’t ruling out Baker Mayfield yet, but the team’s starting quarterback didn’t practice Wednesday and remains in a boot with a high-ankle sprain. That leaves PJ Walker as the only healthy quarterback on the active roster as Sam Darnold remains on injured reserve.
Walker took all the first-team reps Wednesday, readying for his third career start.
“I’m confident in PJ, and I think the players are confident in PJ,” Wilks said, via Darin Gantt of the team website. “This is one of those situations where, you’re sitting where we are right now this season, and everybody could start pressing and trying to do things outside the system. So I foresee that as part of my conversation this week.
“We don’t need one guy to go out and win the football game. Just go out and do what you do.”
Walker was not even going to make the roster after the Panthers drafted Matt Corral in May and traded for Mayfield in July. But things happen in the NFL, and Corral and Darnold both were injured in the preseason.
“Over the summer, I had a different perspective on this whole situation,” Walker said. “I thought about it for about a week. After that week, it is what it is. I was still going to be able to go out in the preseason and play, made the best of that. When I did get my reps in training camp, whatever opportunity, I made the best of it.
“It was a lot going through my mind because I felt like I could play. I felt like I was good enough to be the backup here. But things happen. It’s a business. At the end of the day, I never stopped my approach of going out there and handling my business.”
Now, he is expected to start Sunday against the Rams, six days after the Panthers fired his college coach. Walker played for Matt Rhule at Temple and arrived in Carolina with Rhule in 2020.
Rhule is the coach who gave him an opportunity in the NFL.
While Walker said it “hurt” to see Rhule leave, he acknowledged the league is a business with winning as the bottom line.
“We know at the end of the day we’ve got a job to do,” Walker said. “And if we don’t do our job, we’ll be gone, too.”
Walker, who won his first two NFL starts, is looking forward to the possibility of having a job to do on game day that entails something other than holding the clipboard. It’s an opportunity that he wondered whether he ever would have again.