The biggest hope heading into this season for the Carolina Panthers was any positive development for quarterback Bryce Young who was an absolute disaster his rookie season. What made matters worse too, Carolina traded a No. 1 pick to the Bears for Young whose QBR last season was only better than Zach Wilson.
So, Young can only improve at this point, right?
Well, if that’s true, the indication we got during yesterday’s 47-10 blowout to the Saints on Sunday was that Bryce could get worse.
In his first game of his sophomore NFL season, Young went 13/30 for 161 yards and two interceptions. He looked lost. He looked overwhelmed. He looked every bit of a quarterback who’s going to be out of the league in the next season or two.
If you want to rub more salt on the open wound that is Bryce Young and the Panthers organization, CJ Stroud (2nd overall) who’s on a Texans team that could be playing in the Super Bowl out of the AFC, and Anthony Richardson (4th overall) went right after Carolina took Young first overall. And, even though it wasn’t pretty, Caleb Williams — who again was taken with Carolina’s first-round pick — won yesterday and already has half the wins Young has in his pro career.
Panthers head coach Dave Canales was also blunt in his criticism and didn’t sugarcoat his criticism and approach when it comes to Young.
“I need to make it about the basics and just look at each play as isolated incidents. Look at the play. What was the breakdown? Was it timing? Was it footwork? Was it protection? You know, there’s a lot of factors that go in and I think that if you can be objective about looking at the breakdown of the play itself, then it allows you to improve. That’s what I’m looking forward to.”
You’d like to say that all of this is an overreaction considering it is only week one and we saw plenty of QBs around the league struggle. However, Young’s struggles have been ongoing since the beginning of last year, and you’d hope that at the very least you’d see something to build off in QBs game yesterday. There just wasn’t anything to take from it and you hope that the Panthers have some contingency plans in place because they can’t keep trotting Young out there if he’s going to look like this. It’s not good for him and it’s certainly not good for the team.