Panthers News: Dan Morgan, Miles Sanders, C.J. Henderson and Marquan McCall

Carolina Panthers RB Miles Sanders' mentality

The Carolina Panthers have been extremely cautious with Miles Sanders after the running back suffered an injury during camp. There's no point risking such an important player in preseason games when he isn't at 100 percent, especially considering this is a veteran that knows how to best prepare for a grueling 17-game slate.

Sanders is expected to be in the lineup for Carolina's regular-season opener at the Atlanta Falcons. The former second-round selection is also keen to lead by example with the high-level work ethic that coaches such as Duce Staley demand in pursuit of excellence.

When discussing Carolina's offense, Sanders clearly has high hopes based on his comments via the team's website. The Penn State product also put a special emphasis on explosiveness and ignoring everything fans have seen during warmup games.

"I practice hard, try to finish every run through the end zone, stuff like that, and Duce [Staley] is on us for stuff like that. You guys don't see the practices that we do, so we're grinding every day. I won't let the preseason dictate whatever the season is going to be. Everybody knows what the preseason is for, it's for guys to have an opportunity to make the team. So, I wouldn't necessarily judge it based off that [preseason games], but us grinding every day in practice. I could say that, yeah, we're gonna be very explosive and hopefully hard to beat if we just keep grinding and taking it day by day."

- Miles Sanders via Panthers.com

Much has been made about the vanilla scheme concepts on both sides of the football. That'll change during the regular season, so it'll be interesting to see how this particular dynamic impacts performance levels.