Panthers rest of the season offensive preview

On Thursday, we looked back at what has gone well and what has gone poorly for the offense. The up-and-down nature of the season has given us plenty to look at on both sides of that conversation. It’s made it impossible to predict what is going to happen on any given week. After exploding against the Falcons, most people expected at least a competent performance on Monday Night Football. Instead, the Panthers had one of their worst offensive performances of the season. Naturally that was going to be followed by a blowout loss to the Rams, but instead the Panthers hung 31 points on arguably the best defense in the league and came out with one of the biggest upset wins of the season.

Now the group is on bye to gear up for the home stretch. The schedule isn’t easy, but it also sets the Panthers up to control their own destiny. They come out of the bye against the Saints, which looks easy on paper but we’ve already seen what happens when we expect something to be easy. That’s followed by a closing stretch of Buccaneers, Seahawks, Buccaneers. That’s three straight games against very good defenses to finish out the (regular) season. If the Panthers sweep the Bucs, they need to win just one of the two games against the Saints and Seahawks to make the playoffs.

In order for that to happen, the Panthers are going to need more good performances than bad from this offense, and that’s proven to be a big ask in recent seasons. Here’s what we’ll need to see from the offense in the final month of the season.

• Bryce Young needs to play decisively and confidently. Bryce has obvious physical limitations that get a lot of attention when people discuss his shortcomings, but the bigger problem seems to be what’s going on inside his head rather than how high it is off the ground. Once in a blue moon, Young comes out firing, planting his foot at the top of his drop and hitting receivers down the field. More often, he floats back to the top of his drop, hops around a bit, and then either hurries a throw he clearly doesn’t trust, checks it down, or throws the ball away. We saw a lot of the latter in the early parts of the season, but we saw the good version of Bryce in two of the last three weeks. If we want to be optimistic, the bye week gives Young two weeks to marinate in the confidence of his low volume but highly effective outing against the Rams. If he can do that against the Rams, he can do that against the Bucs and Saints. If he does, it doesn’t even matter what happens against the Seahawks.
• Ride the hot hand on the ground. Rico Dowdle gave life to the Panthers offense when he took over as the starter while Chuba Hubbard was out with injury. The pop has...