Cat Scratch Reader
Will the Panthers quarterback have a strong season?
Bryce Young had an unusual sophomore season as a pro. The 2023 first overall pick was benched after two straight terrible games against the New Orleans Saints and Los Angeles Chargers. New Carolina Panthers head coach Dave Canales switched to Andy Dalton and most of us thought that was it for Young’s career as a Panther. Instead, Young returned to the starting line-up in Week 5 against the Denver Broncos and slowly built a body of work that fans could believe in.
Sure, Young was still 4-6 after his return but wins and losses aren’t everything. Playing against a murderer’s row of opponents—including both the eventual AFC and NFC Champion teams in the Kansas City Chiefs and the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles—didn’t help and neither did having one of the worst defenses in the history of the NFL.
The optimistic story out of those last ten weeks is centered on the four wins—versus New Orleans, against the New York Giants, versus the Arizona Cardinals, and at the Atlanta Falcons—and the two close loses against Kansas City and Philadelphia. Young looked competent and focused in those games. He was also accurate and decisive. He was, in short, every bit the quarterback we were told to expect during his rookie season. I am optimistic, though not totally convinced, that these games represent the floor of Young’s talent for the rest of his career.
To take his stats from just those games and average them across a 17-game season would be the height of cherry picking, however. As a Panthers fan, I have a healthy respect for those kinds of heights. One might call it a deeply jaded phobia.
Instead, we’re going to take his combined stat line from all ten of Young’s starts after he was benched and average those across a 17-game season. Hopefully this gives us a reasonable starting point. In those ten games. Young completed 197 of his 319 pass attempts for a 61.76% completion rate, 2104 yards, 15 touchdowns, and six interceptions. He also ran the ball 37 times for another 223 yards, five touchdowns, and five fumbles, two of which were turnovers.
That would make for season-long stat line of 335 completions on 542 attempts for 3,577 yards, 26 touchdowns, and ten interceptions, with another 63 rushing attempts for 379 yards on the ground and about nine more touchdowns and fumbles. That would have had Young as the ninth most prolific passer by attempts and 16th by yards in the 2024 season. The yardage would have been just 150 yards behind C.J. Stroud’s 2024.
That’s the stat line we would hope to expect out of Young if he was rolling back the exact same team from 2024 into 2025. It is certainly an acceptable, but not inspiring line. The good news for Panthers fans is that...
