Let’s talk about Bryce Young
The Carolina Panthers are hot off of extending their moral victory streak with a third straight game that was almost won in the final minutes but for an errant drop/pass/Patrick Mahomes. It takes two teams having success and making mistakes to have games as close as those the Panthers have been playing recently, and the Philadelphia Eagles were certainly a willing partner in that effort yesterday.
The Eagles are a disciplined, hard hitting team that has talent up and down the roster the likes of which Panthers fans can only dream of. The Eagles let the Panthers stay in this game, only handing the ball to Saquon Barkley 20 times in spite of him averaging 6.2 yards per carry. But Bryce Young and the Panthers did a decent job of taking advantage of that opportunity. They were in the game til the final minute and, once again, Young led an accurate, collected effort to fight for the win throughout the game and specifically in that last two-minute drill.
Drops have been the most consistent villain in Young’s comeback story over the last five weeks. The Panthers were able to weather them against bad teams like the New York Giants and the New Orleans Saints, not so much against better teams like the Kansas City Chiefs and the Eagles. We’re not going to spend time today throwing shade on the receiver(s) responsible. Everybody knows who needs to step up and how.
Instead, let’s talk for a minute about how the Eagles and the Chiefs in particular had been marked off by every serious observer of this team as losses before the schedule was even released. Rightfully so, the Panthers entered this season with an unheralded, unproven rookie head coach and one of the biggest busts of a quarterback in recent history. The reason anybody is sour today over those games being lost is because a couple of perfect passes from that bust of a quarterback were dropped.
That’s phenomenal. This team lost to the Denver Broncos in Week 8 by more points than they lost to the Eagles, the Bucs, and the Chiefs combined. Something is coming together here in Charlotte and Young is at the center of it.
He wasn’t perfect yesterday. He hasn’t been perfect in any game in his career, but you can’t favorably compare the play he has been putting out since that loss to Denver to anything that came before it.
Yes, his stats are uninspiring. His yardage is low, his completion percentage is low, and he hasn’t thrown multiple touchdowns in a game in far too long. But we can’t point to his statistical shortcomings while also blaming his receivers for drops. This would be significantly less of a conversation if his accurate passes were caught. He threw a beautiful ball that should have been a game-winning 32-yard touchdown pass with 0:52 left to play. Nobody is talking about his stats today if that ball had been caught.
This is a wildly more passionate defense of Young than I expected to be writing at this point in the season—or ever. He is still a young, developing player who had an abysmal rookie year. Last year was probably more detrimental than productive for Young, as the first couple weeks of this season showed. His rookie contract may be running out fast, but we shouldn’t be viewing him as a late second year player right now. We should be looking at him as a project.
As a project, he has shown tremendous upside and progress in a narrow window. He’s earned his shot for next year. Panthers fans should be nothing but happy about that. The team has too many holes to re-open quarterback as the biggest hole on the roster. Young stepping up makes the whole team better, not just by his play but by allowing the team next year to spend their resources on the rest of roster.