Four takeaways from Friday, including Jalen Coker’s status, and more

CHARLOTTE — The Panthers listed wide receiver Jalen Coker as questionable on the final injury report Friday, but they won’t really know his status until Saturday.

Panthers head coach Dave Canales said that after putting Coker through a full individual period on Friday and a few team snaps, they want to see how his quadriceps issue responds.

“We’re going to have to see tomorrow,” Canales said. “We’re going to have to gather more information about Jalen to see where that’s headed.

“We’d like to, we’d like to push it as far as possible, and that was kind of the point of getting the condensed work to move him around. We don’t want to overload him on any single day, but wanted to see if we could push him just a little bit more. So we’ll move him around again tomorrow and then see what it’s like on game day.”

Coker leads the team in receptions and yardage this season, but wasn’t able to finish last week’s game and hasn’t practiced fully since. Canales said if they decide he’s not able to go, they’d likely elevate wideout Ja’seem Reed from the practice squad, and lean on Brycen Tremayne as they did last week.

And while a bye next week creates the opportunity for a longer rest for certain players (such as Damien Lewis and Xavier Legette who are already ruled out), Canales wasn’t going to automatically apply that to Coker’s case.

“Really, the approach is always ‘let’s go win this game,’ and if we can get a guy back, we’re not thinking about the bye week,” he said. “It’s a consideration in terms of whether a guy is truly out; for example, D-Lew, Xavier, they’re out this week. It feels good to us knowing we have another week to kind of get them back and going.

“But guys that can play, we need them to play. They want to play, and that’s the way we have to approach it so that all the games are weighted the same for us. We have to take that championship mentality and put our best group out there.”