Was Bryce Young's leap for real?

The Panthers QB broke out in the second-half of 2024. Will his hot-streak sustain into 2025?

I was nervous about the Dave Canales-Bryce Young partnership.

Last offseason, I harped on about concerns I had over the offense Canales was trying to build around Young. Those concerns flashed early: the Panthers were thumped by the Saints to open the season, Young was an unmitigated disaster, he looked lost, panicky, and, you guessed it, small. Things were even more grizzly against the Chargers in Week Two. You know the rest: Young was benched, Andy Dalton took over, and the Panthers looked more stable and productive with a veteran quarterback at the helm. They could actually, you know, move the ball. Then, Young returned to the lineup and — bam — he hit lift-off.

Young’s development arc was one of the stories of last season. He didn’t just rediscover his starting spot; he transformed the trajectory of his career.

Canales, to his immense credit, reformatted his offense. With Dalton at quarterback, the Panthers’ offense was closer to Canales’ desired schematic setup. But good coaches ditch their preferred doctrine in favor of what best helps their players, particularly the quarterback.

Canales didn’t just tweak his offense to suit Young; he tore it down to the studs, giving the second-year starter a platform to salvage his career. Canales empowered Young, whose confidence was on the floor, to play the game in a way that maximized his strengths: his pre-snap smarts, decision-making, accuracy, and creativity. And Young did more than salvage his career — he became a potent weapon, showing off a level of mental and physical toughness that, no matter your thoughts on his long-term outlook, is as admirable as it gets.

For a few weeks, it was magic. Can it sustain?

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Let’s zoom back. Because to recognize where Young is today, you have to remind yourself of where he was 12 months ago.

Young’s rookie season was one of the worst on record. While CJ Stroud was tearing the league apart, the number one overall pick from the same class was being rocked, shocked, and dropped. His -1,078 passing DYAR was the third-worst figure ever recorded, just edged out by Josh Rosen and David Carr. Young was crushed behind a makeshift offensive line and played with fretful indecision, taking 62 sacks and ranking third all-time in the total number of sack-yardage lost (477).

Take the sack yards away from his completions, and Young netted just 4.1 yards per dropback. Adjusted for era, it was the tenth-worst season on record. Not that his 5.5 yards per attempt without sacks was much better. Checkdowns, throwaways, and sacks were the three prongs of Carolina’s offense during Young’s rookie season.

The lack of protection or schematic vision was an easy out for the Bryce Defenders (hand up!), but it didn’t tell the full story. Young was not the same player he was in college. From a twitched-up, agile, sudden pocket creator, he became tetchy. He couldn’t evade the pass-rush, and there was a hiccup in his delivery. Few quarterback prospects in recent years have been as sudden and precise moving from one-to-two in their progression. There are only a handful in the past 15 years who have been as sudden moving from two-to-three in their progression. There was a musicality to it. His feet hit the surface like the keys on a typewriter — bap, bap, bap, bap, ball out.

In his rookie season, the music stopped. Young was among the slowest in the league to scan, plant, and fire. In 17 starts, he had an average time to throw of over 3.15 seconds six times. And this was not the Young of Alabama, buying time to create out-of-structure. Instead, he was cemented to his drop, or bailing out of the scheme altogether. He finished with a 24.5% (!!) pressure-to-sack rate, the worst mark in the league among quarterbacks with at least 300 dropbacks. Even Sam Howell, Desmond Ridder, and Zach Wilson looked at Young’s pressure-to-sack rate and giggled.

Where did the Bryce of Alabama go? Was it confidence? Protection issues? The scheme? His chemistry with a lackluster batch of receivers? The procession of coaches, designers, and play-callers that followed after Frank Reich was axed 11 weeks into his rookie season? Probably a combination of all the above.

Carolina bet on all five, hiring Canales away from the Bucs with the explicit aim of tapping into the potential of a player the Panthers moved Heaven and Earth to tab first in the draft.

Yet Canales’ early vision focused solely on the confidence side. The Panthers organization set to work reinforcing Young’s surrounding offensive line, shelling out cash to reinforce the interior. The goal: to improve the supporting run game and give Young some certainty in the pocket. They put together the most expensive interior in the league, signing Damien Lewis and Robert Hunt to meaty contracts to go along with Austin Corbett. On their own, the deals were not great value, clocking in at $73.6m of the cap last season alone. But the point was to invest in the quarterback — to find out whether the rookie season debacle was the fault of the o-line or if they had misevaluated Young. If all else failed around him, the theory went, at least there should be room to climb up in the pocket. That, plus a coach who believed in the player, should help raise Young from one of the worst starters in the league to closer to the bottom-third — a small but important step forward.

But that idea alone was flawed. Confidence can only take a player so far if the schematic environment is off.

Canales is considered an excellent teacher of fundamentals and concepts, more so than a philosophical type of coach. It’s why he’s had good experience with veteran reclemation projects, like Geno Smith and Baker Mayfield.

Canales put together a good offense with the Bucs. But it was not spectacular. The fireworks in Tampa came last season with Liam Coen, a true schematic whizz kid. Canales was focused more on fundamentals and, yes, instilling confidence, reminding Baker Mayfield (if he needed any help with his ego) that he was a certified starter in the NFL. The Bucs slammed away with the run game, hit play-action shots, and relied on a handful of easy route combinations to simplify things for Mayfield — they finished fourth in slant routes in 2023. With Mayfield and Mike Evans, that was a solid strategy. The Baker-to-Evans connection on quick in-breakers helped earn Canales a head coaching gig. Yet there was some fluky stuff going on under the hood. Tampa had the fourth-worst offense in the league on first and second downs combined, thanks in large part to a predictable and overly cautious playbook filled with quick outs, hitches, screens, and slamming Rachaad White up the gut as much as humanly possible. No team reached third down more frequently than the Buccaneers, and it was only Mayfield’s unsustainably high rate of success on third-down bombs (and those slants) to the likes of Evans or Chris Godwin that kept the Tampa Bay offense afloat.

Still, it was unclear when he rocked up in Carolina whether the Bucs’ season was Canales’ true schematic voice, or simply a coach putting his players in a good spot to succeed.

The answer in Carolina came early. The Tampa offense was how Canales viewed the game. At his first press availability at the 2024 Scouting Combine, Canales said that he would continue to be “stubborn” about running the ball out of heavy sets and loaded backfields, a base element of his Tampa offense. It was important, he said, because it’s how you “create explosive plays in the play-action” and “allows you to have time of possession”. Not wrong, but a worrying sign for his fit with Young.

The Panthers made an organizational decision when they hired Canales rather than a more scheme-forward coach. They had been burned by the Reich experience, and wanted a coach who could instill confidence in Young. As a rah-rah coach, Canales has value. But instilling confidence goes beyond speeches and hugs and happy talk. That stuff you can fake. But Canales’ real value as a confidence builder is that he doesn’t just talk the cliche talk, though there is plenty of that. Canales gave Young immediate autonomy at the line of scrimmage, just as he did with Mayfield – a visceral sign from a coach that tells a quarterback, I believe you can figure this out.

The soft skills were never a doubt with Canales. But as a game-plan builder, play-caller, and play-sequencer, he left plenty to be desired. And the early signs with the Panthers were grim: the pounding in New Orleans, and a clueless-looking Young spinning out against the Chargers.

Those opening two weeks were Young trying to run Canales’ Tampa offense. It was built atop heavy sets, with extra guys kept in to protect the quarterback and fewer players out in the route early. There were some adjustments — a focus on pistol-based looks with two, three, or four players cramming the backfield — but those shifts backfired. They removed options from Young in the pursuit of handing him some extra protection and buying him some extra time. But by trying to ensure he had more time in the pocket, the Panthers reduced the number of options the quarterback had out early in the route. Young flopped. The Panthers scored 13 points in those first two weeks, with Young struggling to complete passes beyond ten yards. And despite the investment up front and the new emphasis on Young mastering protections, the Panthers struggled to bottle up pressure designs. They were blitzed 21 times against the Saints alone, coughing up seven unblocked pressure, and five of them came in the first half.

Young was given no answers against the blitz — odd, given Canales knew he would be keeping extra bodies in the backfield. And Canales’ response was to default to the run game he had been so stubborn about in the offseason; he would run defenses out of sending heat and limit his quarterback’s exposure. That, dear Watson, is how he would crack the Young Confidence code.

As with many coaches, the base plays were variations of wide-zone and duo, with the promise of boots and play-action shots to follow, just as Canales described at the Combine. But the run game couldn’t get rolling. It was too rudimentary, and the new interior didn’t generate enough push. In those opening two weeks, the Panthers lost a wince-inducing -0.74 EPA/play on early down runs, an almost impossibly bad return. Forget any play-action shots, either. Young was left to pick apart defenses with two options down the field. Those low-margin-for-error designs may have worked with Mike Evans — a first-ballot Hall of Famer — but they were not up to snuff with Young and a woeful Panthers receiving corps. From the very first play of the season, it was clear it would not click.

The boots were even more tragic. Young, given his, umm, short stature, had to LEAP just to hit receivers springing to the flat. On true turn-the-back shots, he was panic-stricken, worried about the rush, unable to diagnose what was going on in the defensive backfield after turning his back to the defense. The Panthers ran five turn-the-back play-action reps. The net gain in the passing game: zero yards.

It was the worst-case scenario: a coach hell-bent on a power-run game, limiting the number of eligibles available in the passing game, and putting Young, a quarterback-as-point-guard by traits, in a stand-in-and-deliver role more suited to Sam Darnold or Jared Goff. It was an awful plan, and the Panthers were roundly shellacked.

When he was benched, Young ranked 32^nd in RBSDM composite, which measures the value of a play and how much the quarterback can be deemed responsible for the value. He was dead stinking last in Completion Percentage Over Expectation, sitting on minus-11. And Young did so while cracking the top seven in average intended air yards, a sign of a quarterback panicking and launching away (for what it’s worth, Anthony Richardson topped those standings while also sinking to the bottom in CPOE). It was a tiny sample size, but indicative of issues that had plagued Young throughout his rookie season. He didn’t trust what he was seeing, the scheme, his protection, or his receivers. Benching him, given the offense the Panthers were trying to run, made sense.

Worse, as soon as Andy Dalton swanned into the lineup, the Panthers’ offense was immediately effective and productive. They scored 32 points in Dalton’s first week as the starter.

For Young, the path forward wasn’t just murky. It was Andy Dufresne dropping into the sewers; Young would have to crawl through a river of shit to try to eke out a career. Who knew what was going to happen? Would he sit for the whole season? Would the Panthers trade him? Where would be the landing spot for an error-prone, slight quarterback? Some of us wishcast him as the backup and future starter to Tua in Miami, where he could play in a more natural point guard role under Mike McDaniel. I put my beachfront property on Bryce Island up for Zillow, half off, knowing, deep down, I’d cash in on any offer.

Then it all flipped.