After three games the Panthers find themselves ranked pretty high using Football Outsider's VOA stats.
I'm saying VOA because FO actually has not applied the 'D' to the formula yet but said they didn't take the time to remove the D from the table below. The reason is that they do not factor the rankings based on quality of the opponent until after week 4 (meaning they have a big enough sample size to run the calculation). So given the Panthers have not played the toughest teams just yet we should expect these rankings to drop a little (but I don't expect much).