CANTON, Ohio – Fourth down. Panthers trailing by three. Haynes King took the snap, looked right at his receivers, and did not throw the ball. He tucked it, turned upfield, and ran five yards into the end zone as time expired. The Carolina Panthers’ sideline erupted. His teammates had already gone deep. Nobody on the field expected him to keep it.
That was how an undrafted rookie won a preseason game in Canton on Thursday night.
King, a product of Georgia Tech who signed with the Panthers as an undrafted free agent this spring, finished his NFL debut with 21 completions on 34 attempts for 180 yards and two touchdown passes. He added 39 rushing yards and a third score on the ground, the last one a walk-off that gave Carolina a 33–30 victory over the Arizona Cardinals in the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium.
“I’ll tell you what, I couldn’t breathe,” King said after the game, according to the Carolina Panthers. “But it was amazing.”
The game-winning drive required King to solve a problem in real time. Carolina was trailing by three with the clock running down, and on third-and-14 he scanned his receivers and found match coverage that collapsed before he could locate an open route. He tucked the ball, ran for a first down, scrambled to the sideline to stop the clock, and on fourth down chose not to look downfield at all. His receivers went deep as called. He went the other direction, alone, five yards to the end zone.
“When they called it, and he didn’t look at the receiver, I knew he was going to run,” wide receiver David Moore said. “I’ve never seen the ending of a game like that in the preseason.”
Head coach Dave Canales deployed Kenny Pickett to open the game. Pickett completed 8 of 11 passes for 62 yards across the first three drives before Canales inserted King for the final two-and-a-half quarters. The structure was deliberate. Pickett holds the starting position and the established relationship with Carolina’s first-team offense. King entered against second-string and third-string competition, which is the standard deployment for rookie quarterbacks in the third and fourth positions.
That distinction matters for context. The Cardinals were not running their starters against King for most of the second half. But NFL evaluation happens wherever it happens, and a fourth-down improvisational touchdown with time expiring is the kind of play that coaches describe to each other in the week after it happens. It goes into a file. The file does not care which defensive personnel were on the field.
King came to the Panthers after going undrafted out of Georgia Tech, where he spent four seasons as the Yellow Jackets’ starter. His most publicly visible college performance came in the 2023 season opener against Georgia, a game that required eight overtime periods to resolve and ended with Georgia winning by a single score. King threw for 292 yards in that contest. The Georgia defense that held him on the final possession went on to produce a class of NFL draft picks. King was not one of them.
The quarterback who started for Georgia that night was Carson Beck, now a third-round pick with the Arizona Cardinals. Beck completed 15 of 19 passes for 188 yards and a touchdown in his own professional debut on the same Canton field Thursday. His offensive coordinator called him effortless. The Cardinals moved the ball efficiently and held a three-point lead late in the game. Then King took the snap on fourth down and ran.
Canales said King’s composure in the moment was harder to build than to describe. “We’re not trying to make Haynes anything other than what he is,” the coach said. His postgame instruction to his quarterback reflected that philosophy. King recalled being told to stay humble after the walk-off. “Or he said at least pretend to stay humble,” King added.
Canales also described King’s dual-threat quality in a way that made clear the improvisational element Thursday was not a preseason wrinkle but a design principle. “When we called play actions, he was just as likely to run the ball as he was to throw it down the field for an explosive,” Canales said. A defense that cannot default to a coverage-first response against a passing quarterback operates under a fundamentally different kind of pressure. King gave Canales a data point that defensive coordinators will now account for.
The game was played primarily as a backdrop to Luke Kuechly’s enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Panthers players wore Kuechly’s No. 59 jerseys in warmups. Kuechly spent six seasons defining Carolina’s defensive identity, and the Canton crowd assembled largely in recognition of that era. Travis Hunter in Jacksonville and Sonny Styles in Washington have drawn similar attention this week, young players announcing themselves before roster cuts reshape their paths. King’s platform was the largest of the group: nationally televised, a full stadium, and time expiring on the scoreboard.
Moore had no preseason comparison. King kept it simple. “I just didn’t tell anybody,” he said. “I just told everybody to go deep and took off running.”
The Carolina Panthers won 33–30. The 53-man roster decisions that determine whether King plays in September are still weeks away, and no preseason walk-off run changes what a depth chart says in August. Pickett remains the starter. The backup position is not resolved by one game in Canton, regardless of how that game ended.
What is different is that the coaching staff now has game film of King operating in a live situation, on a fourth-down play, with the outcome dependent on what he chose to do. That is not the same as practice reps or controlled scrimmage tape. It is something coaches put in front of each other before they make the roster calls that fill out a final 53. Haynes King was the last player to touch the ball Thursday night. Everything else will sort itself out in August.
