The 2026 NFL schedule was released on Thursday evening. For the most part, every team knows who and when they will be playing all season—with the exception of Weeks 16-18 when the league won’t announce some of those dates until later in the year. The Carolina Panthers were division champions this past season for the first time since 2015. Using the combined 2025 win-loss record and winning percentage (.521) of their 2026 opponents, Dave Canales’s team has the 10th-most difficult schedule in the league this upcoming season. There will be a flood of predictions for how each NFL team will fare this upcoming season, and of course keep in mind that it’s the middle of May. Some analysis will include factors that are relevant, other reasoning not so much. When it comes to the Panthers’ schedule, here are three factors that will prove relevant when it comes to how things could play out, and two others that won’t have any real bearing in 2026.…