The Carolina Panthers are 5-4 and coming off a road win over the Green Bay Packers. It’s a place no one would have reasonably expected this group to be, and the fan base is rightfully feeling really good
about the direction of the team. However, all of the good vibes are hiding an elephant in the room that has been growing larger and larger—the quarterback is simply not good enough if the team wants to be genuinely competitive.
Bryce Young had a brutal rookie year in which his circumstances let him down. His second year was significantly better, especially in the last few weeks of the season. That provided a lot of optimism that Young would build on that momentum and take a leap in year three. There was also chance that Young’s strong finish to the season was yet another example of a scenario we’ve seen many times before where a mediocre quarterback gets hot during the final weeks of a lost season only to revert to a pumpkin when the meaningful pressure of competitiveness returns with the start of a new season. So far, Young has done more of the latter.
Young hasn’t been bad this season. He’s had bad moments, but the season on the whole has been okay. That seems to be by design. Dave Canales and the coaching staff have asked very, very little of Young. They clearly think that their best chance to win is to rely on the ground game and hope the defense can hold up. Young hasn’t attempted more than 30 passes since the Week 2 comeback attempt against the Arizona Cardinals. That game was the only time this season that Young threw for more than 200 yards, and a lot of that came with the Cardinals playing “kill the clock” defense.
If you look at just about every production metric, Young consistently ranks around the bottom third of the league. He’s 24th in QBR (out of 32), 30th in passer rating (out of 44), 32nd in yards per attempt (out of 44), 24th in success rate (out of 35), and 30th in EPA per play (out of 36). His longest completed pass traveled 41 yards in the air, which is the shortest distance among quarterbacks that have started the majority of their team’s games. His average intended air yards per pass is 29th. I could go on, but I think the point is pretty thoroughly laid out there.
Young consistently ranks in the ball park of quarterbacks like Kyler Murray, Tua Tagovailoa, and Spencer Rattler. From the outside, all of those quarterbacks are in need of upgrades, and in the case of Murray and Rattler, their teams have been content to go with other options. Young is in that same tier of quarterback right now, and if you remove the electric blue-tinted glasses, it’s fair to start wondering if he’s a viable option for the long term. We’re in year three, and he is still a quarterback that needs to be hidden more than he’s relied on. Of course there’s a chance that he can continue building and become a better quarterback, but we’re reaching an inflection point where we have to consider the odds of that actually happening.
There are moments where Young looks like he belongs. He’s capable of throwing with anticipation and threading the needle in traffic. He’s also still capable of airmailing open receivers or outright refusing to throw to open targets down the field, even if he’s seemingly looking right at them. The Panthers are winning games, but that doesn’t mean that every player on the field is playing winning football. It’s possible to overcome underwhelming quarterback play in small doses and even win several games in a row. See Kyle Allen winning five of his first six starts in 2019.
The Panthers have been playing with very narrow margins this season. The offense has been almost entirely based around the ground game with the passing game used as a change of pace or a last resort. That’s not a sustainable offensive model in this version of the NFL. The Panthers are making it work with some otherworldly play by Rico Dowdle, suffocating redzone defense, and expert game management. They’ve been able to use that combination to win Young’s last four starts all by one score (three of which were over bad teams), but the results of some of the earlier season games show how fine that line is. The Panthers are making it work for now, but they can’t do this forever. Young has to be better if this team is going to be legitimately good. If he can’t do that, the Panthers have to start considering alternative plans for the quarterback position for the long term.
