CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The news went from bad to worse for the Carolina Panthers after Sunday's 47-10 loss to the New Orleans Saints when they discovered Pro Bowl defensive tackle Derrick Brown suffered a potentially season-ending knee injury.

A league source confirmed to ESPN that Brown will undergo surgery to repair an apparent meniscus injury.

It was unclear when Brown suffered the injury. He played 60 of Carolina's 66 snaps in its worst opening-day loss in team history and fourth-largest margin of defeat overall.

Brown was coming off a 2023 campaign in which his 103 tackles were the most for an NFL defensive lineman in a season.

Carolina rewarded the seventh pick of the 2020 draft with a four-year, $96 million extension earlier this year.

Brown was Carolina's best defensive player and arguably the best player on the team. Although he's never had more than three sacks in a season, new coach Dave Canales challenged him to have eight to 10 in 2024, something Brown felt was attainable.

NFL Network first reported the news of Brown's injury.

Brown, 26, played 89.1% of Carolina's defensive snaps in 2023. That was second only to linebacker Frankie Luvu and impressive for a man of his size (6-foot-5, 320 pounds) in a 3-4 scheme in which there is a set rotation.

Among the candidates to replace Brown will be second-year player LaBryan Ray, but it's likely general manager Dan Morgan will have to add one or more players at the position that already was thin on depth.

But replacing Brown goes beyond his production in games.

"It's the work ethic of guys like Derrick Brown, you know, our best players happen to be our hardest workers,'' Canales said before the season. "And so, it doesn't leave a lot of space for the rest of the group to kind of pick and choose what they're going to do. They've just got to go; they've got to go hard, they've got to work at it, the individual drills and all that stuff.''