After one year out of the league last season, Hunter Renfrow is ready to make his NFL comeback as a member of the Carolina Panthers.

The legendary former Clemson receiver agreed to a deal with the Panthers on April 27, and in an audio press conference this week, Renfrow spoke about his return to the NFL after not playing in 2024.

Now healthy again, Renfrow feels refreshed and says he gained a lot from his year off.

“It was awesome,” he said. “I think you can do a lot of things in life, and I think it’s good to reset sometimes and good to kind of get healthy. It was awesome for me. I got to spend a lot of time with my two daughters and got to spend a lot of time with my wife, family. Got to kind of get a better understanding of what I want to do after football, so that was exciting for me. But because I got all that in order, now I feel like I’m at peace and I can go do the football thing and enjoy what I love to do. So, I learned a lot. I got to work with an incredible group of guys, and it was a really peaceful and kind of revamping time for me.”

Renfrow recently explained why he didn’t play last season, revealing that health challenges kept him off the field last year – specifically, the autoimmune condition ulcerative colitis, which caused weight loss, fatigue and high fevers.

Now that the condition is under control, the 29-year-old is excited to do what he loves again and play football for the first time since the 2023 campaign.

After that season, Renfrow became a free agent in March 2024 when he was released by the Raiders, the team he spent five seasons with after they selected him in the fifth round of the 2019 NFL Draft.

Renfrow’s release came just a couple years after he signed a two-year, $32 million contract extension in June 2022, including $21 million in guaranteed money.

Renfrow was highly productive across his first three seasons with the Raiders from 2019-21, tallying 208 receptions for 2,299 yards and 15 touchdowns. However, he caught only 36 passes for 330 yards and two touchdowns across 10 games in 2022 while being limited due to injury, then had career lows with 25 catches, 255 receiving yards and no touchdowns over 17 games in his final year with the Raiders in 2023 — two years after his Pro Bowl 2021 campaign that saw him record career highs with 103 receptions, 1,038 yards and nine touchdowns.

Renfrow discussed the timeline from when he got released, to this past January, when he knew he wanted to get back in the NFL and was healthy enough to do so.

“I felt so bad those two years, and I felt like I let my teammates down so much,” Renfrow said. “Because I had expectations. I just signed a new contract, I had a new coaching staff that I was going to be perfect for. They had (Julian) Edelman, they had (Danny) Amendola, they had all these guys, and I was just a dud. And I was like, man, I know I don’t feel well, but I do not want to play football again. I do not want to let people down. I want to just go over here in my corner and do what I do, get into business. So, I was doing that for a little bit.

“Really, when I started feeling a lot better was the first time I was like, well, maybe I can do this again. I went to a couple high school football games, and I was like, man, they’re having fun. That’s what I used to do. I used to have fun playing this game. So, you have a lot of occurrences like that, that build up over time, and you’re like, man, I kind of want to go out a different way if I’m going to go out.”

Renfrow noted he’s “a college football guy” and so he didn’t watch a lot of NFL while he was away from the game last year, though he did “watch the Panthers some just because I watched them growing up and that was always my team.”

From what he did see of the Panthers, Renfrow was impressed. He said watching them progress toward the end of the season under first-year head coach Dave Canales “reminded me a little bit of Clemson back in 2010, 2011 when Coach Swinney was starting to get things going.”

“You had some people buying in, believing, and I saw some kind of similarities between that and what Coach Canales was building,” he said. “So, it was cool to watch and it was a lot of momentum to be able to come in and step into, and just a lot of good energy in the building.”

You can check out Renfrow’s full interview with the media below: