New Carolina Panthers head coach Dave Canales was not around for Bryce Young’s rookie campaign last year, but he still has a general idea of what Young went through because of what Young has shared with him.
While speaking about Young’s rough debut season, Canales said that he thinks the adversity will actually help the raw signal-caller moving forward.
“I think that’s one of the things that I’ve learned about him,” Canales said, via the Panthers’ official team website. “He’s like, ‘I’m glad I went through this past year. I’m glad I had the challenges of this because this is very different than anything that I’ve experienced up to this point,’ you know, and to feel him and to hear his hopefulness for where we’re headed, it’s exactly what you would hope to hear from your quarterback and, and from a guy that, that sees the best for himself going forward.”
Frank Reich was Young’s head coach for most of 2023, but Reich was fired during the second half of the season and replaced by now former special teams coordinator Chris Tabor in an interim role.
The Panthers hired Canales earlier this offseason, and Canales is already diving into how he can make Young a better player moving forward.
“It’s everything, because it’s not just about the pass game and what suits him best and what puts him on his best foot, but it’s the whole offense,” Canales said. “It’s how much can we play at the line of scrimmage? How much can we do in the run game? And then how can we grow incrementally as he takes on these things and allows us to really be an attacking style of offense that we want to be? The best way to do that is to refine the system and the pre-snap operation. But then also dive into the pass game and say, what does he throw with a firm back foot? That’s kind of the litmus test.”
Young, who played his collegiate football at the University of Alabama, was selected by Carolina with the No. 1 overall pick of the NFL Draft last spring.
The 22-year-old struggled quite a bit in his first season, throwing for 2,877 yards, 11 touchdowns and 10 interceptions while completing 59.8 percent of his passes and posting a passer rating of 73.7.
What made matters even worse for Young was that fellow first-year quarterback C.J. Stroud—who went second overall to the Houston Texans—had one of the best rookie campaigns ever.
But all Young can really focus on his himself, and given all of the experience Canales has had with signal-callers like Russell Wilson, Geno Smith and Baker Mayfield, it seems safe to say that Bryce Young is in good hands heading into his sophomore campaign.
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