The most telling evidence that it was time for the Bryce Young era to end in Carolina is the immediate acceptance that followed. Nobody seemed to mind. There were no fans putting up signs supporting the embattled quarterback on the way to the facility, as there were for Justin Fields in Chicago after last season. No obvious replacement had rendered Young irrelevant with his play, as happened when Brock Purdy overtook Trey Lance in San Francisco. Eighteen games into Young’s tenure, just two games into his second season, the Panthers benched the No. 1 pick in last year’s draft and everyone collectively shrugged and said, “That makes sense.”
By the numbers, it’s difficult to argue with the decision. Young isn’t getting better. He’s actually significantly worse than he was a year ago. As I wrote Monday, through the first two games, the Panthers have the second-worst expected points added (EPA) per play of any offense since 2007. Young’s 9.1 QBR ranks 504th out of the 506 passers to throw at least 50 passes through Week 2. The quarterback just behind him, ironically, is Andy Dalton, who posted a 7.4 QBR over his first two starts in 2017.
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The guy who’s last on that list is Matthew Stafford, who had a 5.6 QBR in his first two NFL starts during the 2009 season, when the Lions went 2-14. I’m not suggesting Stafford’s turnaround is proof Young can do the same, but it seems natural to both reflect on how we got here and what comes next. How could Young have fallen out of favor so quickly? Has this happened before? And was anyone who went through this able to make his way back to relevance as an NFL quarterback?
Let’s take a look into what has happened. While it might feel obvious, it was only a year ago that Young was regarded as a potential franchise quarterback. There are lots of questions to answer here, and even more to come between now and the trade deadline on Nov. 5.
Jump to a section:
Has any QB like Young been benched so quickly?
Is he the worst No. 1 overall pick ever?
Is the Young move the worst recent trade?
Does he have any trade value?
Which teams make sense as a landing spot?
Is there any way Young could turn things around?
Is this a sign teams shouldn’t draft short QBs?
Will the Panthers be better with Andy Dalton?
Put it this way: In just about any other situation, benching a quarterback with three guaranteed years left on his contract two starts into the season would be considered a panic move. I’m not sure the Panthers had much of a choice, however. Their offense wasn’t functional with Young under center. Nothing worked. And while arguments could be made that he wasn’t getting much help, his struggles in obvious passing situations and inability to threaten teams downfield was putting a breathtakingly low floor and ceiling on the offense.
Had Young been struggling in 2024 the same way he had been in 2023, I would argue the Panthers should have given him more time. That just wasn’t the case. He has been much worse. His raw numbers are abysmal and even they are inflated by garbage time, where Carolina has spent most of the second half of its games. His lone touchdown drive through two games came trailing by 34 points in the third quarter against the Saints in the opener.
In 2023, when the Panthers had at least a 10% chance of winning their games per ESPN’s win probability metric, Young’s 34.3 QBR and 4.2 yards per dropback were the worst marks in the league for qualifying quarterbacks. In 2024, in those same situations, he has a 1.4 QBR and is averaging 1.1 yards per dropback. While acknowledging it’s only a two-week sample, nobody has played that poorly in non-garbage time situations over any sort of extended period of time. The only passer with a sub-20 QBR in those situations who qualified for a passing title was, of all people, former Panthers draftee Jimmy Clausen in 2010.
It’s possible Young might have proved to regress toward the mean and settle back in as merely the league’s worst quarterback as opposed to the outlier he has been through two weeks, but he doesn’t look much better than the numbers on tape. While the Panthers aren’t the Chiefs — and I’d take issue with the idea there are a ton of plays to be made in this offense — he looks shell-shocked and unsure of himself as a passer. When there are opportunities to find successful plays in the context of this offense, he hasn’t been able to make them.
There’s a two-play sequence in the third quarter of last Sunday’s loss to the Chargers that might have convinced coach Dave Canales it was time for a change. With the game already out of hand, the goal was likely to find Young some confidence-boosting completions. It didn’t happen. On a second-and-7, Canales called for a boot concept to the left side of the field, with three receivers flooding the same side to give Young a half-field read. He successfully exited the pocket and escaped the unblocked rusher, but he didn’t set his feet before throwing, and his pass to a wide-open Diontae Johnson missed badly.
On the next snap, Young worked to the left side of the field and found nobody open. With the opportunity to climb in the pocket and try to make a play, he exited the left side of the pocket, where pass rusher Joey Bosa was able to chase him down for a sack. Veteran receiver Adam Thielen, believing he was open for what would have been a long completion, visibly signaled his frustration at the end of the play.
Young didn’t have issues with arm strength during his time at Alabama, but he looks either unwilling or unable to throw downfield at the moment. His longest completion on Sunday was 11 yards downfield. He is 3-of-9 for 85 yards with two interceptions and a league-low QBR of 0.2 when throwing 15-plus yards downfield this season. On a subsequent fourth-and-18 in the Chargers game, he immediately threw a 10-yard glance route to Thielen, who had no prayer of picking up the first down.
At this point, Young looks better when he’s acting instinctually than when he’s being forced to make decisions, which wasn’t the book on him before the draft. He was regarded as a patient, accurate passer who made smart decisions with the football and toed the line effectively between extending plays to create out of structure and scrambling for the sake of hoping something develops out of chaos. The 5-foot-10 Young always seemed a step ahead of opposing defenses with natural creativity, which helped compensate for his lack of size and prototypical arm strength.
That step is gone. Watching the pro version of Young looks like a quarterback who is both afraid to pull the trigger on throws and unable to make accurate throws into windows when they’re open. He understandably lost trust in his offensive line about three weeks into the 2023 season and still hasn’t regained it, so he looks uncomfortable in the pocket. His receivers weren’t getting open last season, so he appears reticent to toss up 50/50 balls or anything that isn’t wide-open. And having had his footwork picked apart by the coaching staff last season, he has become a less accurate professional quarterback.
The two best characteristics Young in college were his poise and creativity. Those were the reasons I was optimistic about his chances of succeeding at the highest level. Neither of them have been spotted often over the first two games of 2024. Without them, he isn’t an NFL-caliber quarterback; he doesn’t have the elite arm, physical tools or frankly the help to operate as a purely traditional quarterback in Carolina.
While acknowledging there are various definitions of highly touted and Young’s career is not yet over, this would qualify as an egregious start. I’ll define highly touted quarterbacks as players taken in the top five of the draft, and to avoid comparisons between the modern NFL and a time in which quarterbacks would routinely switch positions or retire after short careers for financial reasons, I’ll consider only passers drafted after the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.
I also need to make a distinction. There are a number of prominent quarterbacks whose career fell by the wayside for factors unrelated to football. Ryan Leaf and JaMarcus Russell have publicly acknowledged substance dependencies that compromised their careers. Art Schlichter was suspended for gambling. It doesn’t make sense to compare Young to those top picks, and I won’t be including them in the comparisons and analysis I make below.
In terms of games started with the team that drafted him, the worst top-five pick of the modern era is Lance. The former 49ers quarterback, drafted No. 3 overall in 2021, started two games as a rookie and two games in his second season before suffering a fractured fibula. You know what happened next: By the end of the year, Purdy had taken over as San Francisco’s starter. The Cowboys traded for Lance, and while it’s still early, he didn’t look good taking extended snaps in preseason. At the very least, we can say the 49ers got fewer starts out of Lance than any other team got out of a quarterback it took in the top five.
Next up would be former Bengals draftee Jack Thompson, who was selected with the No. 3 pick in 1979. He made five starts with Cincinnati, all during his first two years with the team, before eventually making 16 more with the Buccaneers. “The Throwin’ Samoan” didn’t pan out as a great quarterback, but he had competition on the roster in veteran Ken Anderson, who fought off Thompson to keep the starting job and eventually won an MVP award in 1981. He doesn’t feel like a good comparison for Young, either.
The two signal-callers competing with Young are a pair of No. 3 picks. In 1994, Washington drafted Heath Shuler and — after a holdout — made him the highest-paid draftee in league history when it gave him an eight-year, $19.3 million deal. It expected Shuler to be the quarterback for the next decade, but he completed less than 48% of his passes across 13 starts and two seasons. He was traded to the Saints after his third season, started nine games for coach Mike Ditka and then never played again.
The other candidate is Akili Smith. The third of three quarterbacks taken atop the 1999 draft, he held out for 27 days before joining the Bengals. He started four games as a rookie and 11 more in his sophomore season, going 3-12 with a 53.8 passer rating. While he hoped to right the ship before the 2001 season, Cincinnati handed the starting job to Jon Kitna. Smith was an injury replacement for one more start in 2002 and 2003 before his NFL career ended, giving him a total of 17 starts over four years.
That’s about it. Even Zach Wilson, who was benched during his second season and traded after Year 3 with the Jets, managed 22 starts through Year 2 and 33 total in a New York uniform. He was the No. 2 pick in the same draft as Lance. Quarterbacks drafted as high as Young almost always get plenty of time and usually multiple opportunities to prove they aren’t NFL-caliber players. The accelerated path he took out of the starting job might speak either to the pace at which teams are willing to cycle through passers in the current NFL or just how overwhelmed Young has looked as a professional through two seasons.
Was Young worse than Smith or Shuler? One way to gauge it is by using the adjusted net yards per attempt index (ANY/A+), a Pro Football Reference measure that adjusts an advanced passing metric for era and normalizes it so 100 is always league average. Looking at every top-five pick and the seasons they put together in their first two campaigns with a 100-attempt minimum, Shuler’s rookie season ranked as the seventh-worst of any player since 1970. Young’s rookie season was eighth. Smith’s second season ranked ninth, while his rookie season was 17th-worst.
Shuler’s second season was all the way up as the 49th-worst performance in Year 1 or 2 of a top-five quarterback, separating him from the pack. Given the competition around them, the draft stock used to acquire them, how much they struggled and how quickly they lost their handle on the starting job, I’d have to put Smith and Young alongside each other as the worst on-field quarterbacks to be taken in the top five.
Even if he doesn’t do anything else in a Panthers uniform, I can’t make the case that Young is the most disappointing top selection ever in terms of production on the field. You’ll understand why in a minute.
I’ll start by bringing up a couple of players whose careers were severely compromised by injuries. Colts defensive lineman Steve Emtman (1992) managed 14 starts over two seasons because of various injuries, most notably a torn MCL and ruptured patella, before bouncing around the league as a reserve. And when the Bengals traded up to take running back Ki-Jana Carter with the top pick in 1995, they couldn’t have known what was in store. Carter tore his ACL on his third carry of the preseason, missed his entire rookie campaign and never fully recovered. He averaged 3.3 yards per carry in four subsequent years with the Bengals and finished his NFL career with 313 rush attempts.
It’ll be nearly impossible, though, to top the worst No. 1 selection in NFL history: Bo Jackson. If you’re thinking of the Auburn legend running past people in a Raiders uniform, well, you don’t know (or are forgetting an essential part of) Bo. While he spent his entire pro career on the field with the Raiders, he was first drafted by the Buccaneers in 1986.
Jackson had no interest in playing for Tampa Bay because of a pre-draft visit that compromised his ability to play college baseball and declined the Bucs’ contract offers, and when he remained unsigned by the 1988 draft, they lost his rights with no compensation in return. As bad as Young has been, the Panthers at least sold a few jerseys with his name on the back. The Bucs got nothing for their top pick and then saw him go to the Raiders as a seventh-round pick in 1987.
And yet, Young doesn’t have the same excuses these other picks do. He didn’t suffer a career-altering injury. He didn’t leave football to go play baseball. Tim Couch, who spent five seasons with generally below-average efficiency for the expansion Browns after going No. 1 in 1999, lasted much longer and was more productive than Young. It’s fair to make a case Young is the worst No. 1 pick in terms of players who were relatively healthy during their careers with their pro teams.
There’s a stronger case after factoring in the assets sent to acquire Young. The Panthers traded top wide receiver DJ Moore, two first-round picks and two second-round picks to move up in the draft with the Bears. One of those first-round picks became the top pick in the 2024 draft, allowing Chicago to land Caleb Williams, who is off to a slow start but doesn’t appear to be on a Young track.
Perhaps that’s reinforced by the fact the Texans appear to have landed a franchise-altering quarterback in C.J. Stroud, who was taken with the pick after Young. When we’ve seen teams take quarterbacks 1-2 in the draft, the top pick has usually turned out to be the better player, with Peyton Manning over Leaf and Drew Bledsoe over Rick Mirer as prominent examples. In a way, the one blessing for the Panthers might be that the stories will be muddied; some people will note they passed on Stroud to take Young, while others will point out they missed on Williams.
Probably not much. Canales said Wednesday trading Young is “not something we’re really considering,” and the Panthers don’t have any leverage in dealing him. There are likely a handful of teams that will cross him off their backup list because of his height and extreme struggles at the NFL level.
At the same time, quarterback trades often defy expectations. The Cardinals got very little out of Josh Rosen in his one season with the franchise, drafted Kyler Murray in 2019 and still managed to get a second-round pick from the Dolphins in a trade for Rosen. Nick Foles’ contract was badly underwater after a failed season with the Jaguars, but the Bears still sent a fourth-round pick to acquire the former Super Bowl MVP in 2020. Teams have traded picks for Kenny Pickett, Mac Jones and Sam Darnold over the past few years. They have traded picks for Carson Wentz in two separate deals. General managers will tell themselves stories about quarterbacks and pay for the privilege of finding out whether they’re true.
Young is owed just over $813,000 for the rest of 2024, $4.2 million in 2025 and $5.9 million in 2026, all of which is guaranteed. Any team acquiring him would have the ability to decide on a potential fifth-year option for his rights in 2027, a choice they wouldn’t have to make until the spring of 2026. That’s basically backup money. Jarrett Stidham (two years, $10 million), Mitchell Trubisky (two years, $11.3 million) and Taylor Heinicke (two years, $14 million) have signed contracts in this range in free agency over the past few years.
Young’s contract itself isn’t hard to deal for Carolina. It would owe $6.2 million in dead money this season and $12.3 million next year. In a world in which the Broncos just ate $85 million in dead money to move on after two years of Russell Wilson, the Panthers aren’t going to have trouble finding the cap space if they want to make a deal. They could theoretically eat some of the future salary owed to Young to help net a better return, but there’s not enough left on this deal to make a significant difference.
My guess is Young would be worth a late Day 3 pick. Perhaps the Panthers could land a conditional pick that rises in value if he takes regular snaps for his new team. The closest comparable in terms of recent trades is probably Rosen, who netted a Day 2 pick on draft day with three years of cost control left on his deal. Rosen’s size and the timing of the trade, with a full offseason to practice after the deal, probably meant he had more of a market than Young will over the next few weeks.
There aren’t many teams seeking a potential quarterback of the future right now. I’d argue the Raiders, Titans and Giants have real questions about whether they have the right guy under center. The Jets will need somebody if 40-year-old Aaron Rodgers retires. The Steelers have short-term deals with Fields and Wilson. I’m not sure any of those teams will trade for a quarterback during the season.
Like my colleague Ben Solak suggested, there’s one team I see that makes obvious sense in a Young trade, both in the short- and long-term. The Dolphins just signed Tua Tagovailoa to a four-year, $212.4 million extension, but he suffered his third concussion in the past 24 months. Tagovailoa was placed on injured reserve, so he’ll miss the next four games at a minimum, and there are realistic questions about whether Young’s predecessor at Alabama will return to football.
The backup in Miami is Skylar Thompson, who has averaged 5.2 yards per attempt across 119 passes as a pro, and the team added Tyler Huntley from the Ravens’ practice squad to sit behind Thompson. The Dolphins have a need for a short-term solution at quarterback while Tagovailoa’s hurt, a passer who can fill in if Tagovailoa doesn’t return until much later in the season and a player who could serve as the long-term replacement for Tagovailoa if the 26-year-old leaves football.
Young would at least have a theoretical path toward filling those roles if he went to Miami. The offense would be a good fit for him in the way that playing for Mike McDaniel and with Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle is a good fit for anyone, but perhaps the bigger thing is it would help minimize some of his weaknesses and bad habits. Young would play the RPO game and be limited to quick, simple decisions. The furiously quick nature of the passing game would allow him to avoid pass pressure and larger defenders in his face. After playing with the league’s slowest receiving corps in Carolina, working with one of the fastest would undoubtedly create more opportunities after the catch to make his life easier. Young doesn’t have an elite arm, but he doesn’t need one to thrive in Miami.
I wrote earlier that Young had the ninth-worst ANY/A+ for a top-five pick in one of his first two seasons in league history. His ANY/A+ was 67. Have there been quarterbacks with sub-67 ANY/A+ marks who have eventually rounded into solid NFL passers?
Yes. Quite a few, actually, many of whom were No. 1 picks. Jared Goff had a 52 ANY/A+ in his first season with the Rams (2016), a year in which he averaged 5.3 yards per attempt and threw seven picks in 205 attempts. The Rams lost all seven games Goff started. They fired coach Jeff Fisher in December and hired Sean McVay in the offseason, signed Andrew Whitworth and Robert Woods, traded for Sammy Watkins and drafted Cooper Kupp. Things got better quickly. Goff’s passer rating jumped by nearly 40 points, and the Rams became a perennial playoff contender. He wasn’t traded, but given how much around him changed, he might as well have been.
Even worse than Goff was Alex Smith, whose 49 ANY/A+ is the fourth-worst for any quarterback in their first two seasons since 1970. He threw one touchdown pass against 11 picks as a rookie in 2005. He was better in Year 2, but after offensive coordinator Norv Turner left to take the Chargers job, Smith fell further. He struggled in 2007 and missed all of 2008 with a shoulder injury. Niners fans wanted Smith benched as late as 2010, his sixth season in the league, before he finally became entrenched as an NFL starter with the arrival of Jim Harbaugh in 2011. He was an above-average starter for the next eight years in San Francisco and Kansas City.
There are others in the Young ballpark. In what was admittedly a different era. Bert Jones posted a 51 ANY/A+ in 1973, four seasons before he won league MVP. Terry Bradshaw threw 24 interceptions in his rookie year after being drafted with the first pick in 1970, which produced a 65 ANY/A+. He turned out fine. Randall Cunningham had a 68 ANY/A+ in 1986. Donovan McNabb posted a 69 ANY/A+ in 1999. Troy Aikman was at 72 in 1989. Eli Manning had a 74 in 2004.
I’d also point out we’re two weeks into a season in which many of the best quarterbacks, at least so far, have been reclamation projects who were cast off by their former teams. Sam Darnold ranks fourth in QBR after being traded by the Jets in 2021 and bottoming out with the Panthers. Geno Smith, who spent years toiling in anonymity after looking overmatched in two years as the Jets starter in 2013 and 2014, has thrived with the Seahawks and ranks fifth in QBR. The guy just below him is Baker Mayfield, who was salary-dumped by the Browns in 2022, benched and cut in midseason by Carolina and parlayed a brief run with a desperate Rams team into an opportunity with the Bucs. Justin Fields doesn’t have an incredible QBR, but he’s 2-0 and has looked much better in his brief run with the Steelers.
There are also veterans thriving who had longer starting runs and were still essentially abandoned by their former teams. The Raiders benched and cut longtime starter Derek Carr so former coach Josh McDaniels could move forward with Jarrett Stidham and then Jimmy Garoppolo. Carr leads the NFL in QBR, one year after Saints fans were booing him off the field at home games. Goff hasn’t gotten off to a great start this season, but he’s a year removed from the NFC Championship Game, a dramatic turnaround for a player the Rams salary-dumped on the Lions as part of the Matthew Stafford trade.
Do I think Carr is a significantly better quarterback today than he was a year ago? Is Goff much better now than he was at the end of 2020, when McVay essentially lost faith in him and started John Wolford in a playoff game? Not really. Their confidence is improved, but the big difference is they have better players around them. Goff is blessed with some of the best playmakers in all of football. Carr is finally in an offense that uses play-action and motion at modern rates. Mayfield has two elite wideouts and an organization that believes in him. Smith isn’t playing for his job every week. Darnold has that guy who produced a 97-yard touchdown in Week 2. All of that stuff helps!
The success of Mayfield and Darnold (in a smaller sample) after leaving Carolina suggest the Panthers might be the bigger problem here. Both passers had Moore in the lineup, which Young has not. In my playmaker rankings, which attempt to rank the running backs, wide receivers and tight ends for each team independent of quarterback, offensive line, scheme and staff, the Panthers ranked seventh in 2021 and 18th in 2022. They were 31st in 2023 and 28th in 2024.
That alone isn’t disqualifying — the Texans were last heading into 2023 and Stroud raised everyone’s game — but it’s also fair to point out Young was working with an extremely underwhelming group of playmakers which struggled to get open week after week on tape last season. The dysfunction behind the scenes with Frank Reich’s staff a year ago has been well-documented. A transcendent quarterback might have been able to thrive beyond all of that, but reducing signal-callers to organization-transcendent or globally unplayable is foolish. There is a huge space between those two extremes. Young might be totally unplayable. He could also be a viable backup or a solid starter in a much better situation. It seems clear he wasn’t the answer in Carolina, but that shouldn’t put an end to his career.
Maybe. I will say the biggest concern about Young coming into the league was more about his weight (204 pounds at the combine) and slightness than his height. He missed one game as a rookie, but he isn’t being taken out of the lineup because he hasn’t been able to physically handle the exertion of pro football.
Young is not an unprecedented candidate to play quarterback. Kyler Murray is also 5-foot-10. Doug Flutie, who struggled early in his career and had to thrive in the CFL before getting a chance to prove himself in his 30s with the Bills and Chargers, was also 5-foot-10. Russell Wilson is 5-foot-11, and if you’re willing to go all the way to 6-foot, Drew Brees and Michael Vick have excelled, along with several other Hall of Famers from prior regimes.
Did Young’s height hinder his progress? It probably didn’t help and led to him scrambling out of the pocket more often. At the same time, it’s not like his passes were being swatted out of the sky. He had five passes batted down at the line last season. The league leader was Sam Howell, three inches taller than Wilson, who had 18. From a rate perspective, Young had 0.9% of his passes batted down, which ranked 28th in the league.
Thinking about height as a binary element of a quarterback’s traits with tall being “good” and short being “bad” probably doesn’t lend itself to good analysis. Murray’s frame likely plays to his strengths as a scrambler and a player who escapes would-be pass rushers to extend plays. It’s harder to duck a pass rusher at 6-foot-4 than it is at 5-foot-10. Wilson was one of the most talented dual-threat quarterbacks in the league at his best, and Vick was maybe the most physically talented quarterback in NFL history.
It would be easy to argue that players need to be a great athlete and capable of creating plays with their legs if they’re a smaller quarterback if it weren’t for the existence of Brees, who had a better career than any of those other passers without ever scrambling for more than 22 yards on a single snap. He also eventually turned into the league’s most devastating chain-mover, setting league records for completion percentage into his age-40 campaign. Young hasn’t shown any ability to be that sort of player.
Then again, while he wasn’t as bad as Young, Brees’ early struggles have mostly been consigned to history. After sitting out most of his rookie season, the second-round pick posted solid numbers in Year 2 before taking a step backward in Year 3, leading the Chargers to bench him for Flutie. After the season, they signaled their plans to move on from Brees by acquiring Philip Rivers, only for Brees to level up overnight and improve his passing numbers dramatically.
I’ll discuss the chances of Young turning things around later, but I’m not sure his failure as a pro so far is evidence that shorter quarterbacks can’t thrive, any more than JaMarcus Russell flaming out with the No. 1 overall pick is proof that 6-foot-6 quarterbacks can’t hack it in the NFL. The selection process already leans heavily toward teams drafting bigger quarterbacks, which is why many of the few sub-6-footers who do make it into the league end up succeeding. Teams might hesitate to take a passer this small with the top pick next time around, but they would be foolish to rule out drafting a smaller passer if they believed he had skills that would translate to the next level.
I think so. The 36-year-old Dalton has only been a regular starter once in the past four seasons, but he was competent when he started 14 games for the Saints in 2022, completing nearly two-thirds of his passes while averaging 7.6 yards per attempt. In his lone start last season, former Carolina coach Frank Reich inexplicably had Dalton drop back to pass 61 times, with Dalton going 34-of-58 for 361 yards and two touchdowns in a 37-27 defeat at Seattle.
Dalton won’t have Young’s mobility nor theoretical upside. In terms of being able to deliver the ball on time as part of simple pass concepts, though, he should be an upgrade on what we saw from Young through two weeks. At this point, that would be a step in the right direction for Carolina. Being able to field a functional passing offense before Jonathon Brooks returns from his torn ACL next month would be a victory for Canales and his staff.
I’d still tread carefully in projecting the Panthers to look like a solid offense. Their pass protection has improved after the heavy spending this offseason, but left tackle Ikem Ekwonu remains a liability and a disappointment as the 2022 No. 6 overall pick. Their receivers might be schemed open by design here and there, but this isn’t an offense with anybody who is going to consistently win against man coverage on a regular basis. It’s still likely the worst situation for any quarterback in the NFC, with the Patriots competing for that title in the AFC.
I’ve heard the argument the Panthers should have kept Young in the lineup over the rest of the season, even if they felt Dalton was the best quarterback, just so they could maximize their chances of landing the No. 1 overall pick in next year’s draft and a shot at another passer, such as Georgia’s Carson Beck. And certainly, while they might not admit it publicly, there are teams that keep a subpar quarterback in their job late in the season to ensure they’ll end up with the best pick possible.
The issue there is there are still 15 games to go. Carolina’s stadium didn’t look full in its home opener, and it wasn’t going to attract more fans after what we saw with Young over the first two games. With his confidence shot and Canales losing faith, it’s difficult to believe things were about to get better.
Playing with a hopeless quarterback has a way of wearing on a franchise. The locker room might have lost their faith in Young, as we saw Thielen visibly frustrated on the field when he felt he should have been targeted in Week 2. A new coaching staff playing who their players believe to be the wrong quarterback isn’t going to have an easy time handling their locker room. Team owner David Tepper fired a coach at midseason each of the past two years. Canales might have felt like it was quickly going to become him or his quarterback.
Only if it turns out Tepper wanted to bench his quarterback and Canales wanted Young to stay as the starter. While I can understand the reticence to have Tepper involved with personnel decisions, the idea any owner would have no say or input into the franchise’s starting quarterback being benched is a little naive. There might be a few teams that hand over full responsibility for roster decisions to their coach and/or general manager and have the owner get out of the way, but benching a quarterback — especially a highly drafted one like Young — is different than swapping out guards.
Every owner is going to want to hear his team’s quarterback is about to be benched before it happens. I’m not saying they would exercise veto power or control over the position in every case, but I’m aware of at least one NFL owner who has called his football staff Monday morning in recent years and told the coaches it needed to make a change at quarterback. I would hardly be surprised if that was the only one.
What makes this change so fascinating is Canales is only two games into his new job as coach. When the Panthers conducted their hiring process this offseason, they would have surely targeted coaches who felt confident they could turn around Young and make him the player the Panthers expected. It seems dramatic that Canales would have lost faith in his ability to fix him so quickly. We’ll find out more about the process that led into the decision as time goes on, but the Panthers went from building around Young to giving up on him in a matter of 67 dropbacks.
Gulp. This isn’t exactly a group a player wants to be thrown into. We’ve had three utterly disastrous trades involving multiple first-rounders for quarterbacks over the past few seasons. Is this the worst trade of the bunch?
There’s no concrete answer — yet. The Bears-Panthers trade included Moore, a high-end wide receiver, who was the best individual player to move in these deals. The Seahawks got three roster players as part of the Wilson deal, while the Browns deal was all picks, including three first-rounders. Some might want to consider the actual players the teams acquired with each selection, while I tend to lean toward the value of the picks as being more meaningful in evaluating each deal.
What I come back to is salary. Each of these teams paid way too much in draft capital for their respective quarterbacks, but the Panthers are only on the hook for about $38 million over four years for Young, or $9.5 million per year. The Broncos ended up paying Wilson $124 million for two years, which is $62 million per season. The Browns aren’t paying Watson quite as much per year, but his five-year, $230 million deal is fully guaranteed, with Watson earning $46 million per year through 2026.
If those figures sound astronomical, keep in mind we’re not even including the surplus value of the draft picks sent to acquire these passers. Ben Baldwin’s non-quarterback draft value chart pegs the average value of a first-rounder at 3.3% of the salary cap per season, a second-rounder at 2.6% per year, and down to a seventh-rounder at about 0.1% of the cap each season. Because we know what each pick is paid on the slotted scale, we can use this to help inform the value of the picks sent to acquire these quarterbacks.
Given that each pick provides surplus value for four years and all the selections have actually been made but one, I’ll use Baldwin’s chart, the actual salaries of each pick and the cap figures for each year to include surplus value in those calculations. For the 2025 second-rounder the Panthers still owe the Bears, I treated the pick as an average second-round selection and used an estimated cap of $275 million for 2025.
Including the value of the picks sent to acquire each of those quarterbacks, the Panthers are paying Young an extra $7 million per season in lost surplus value, totaling $16.5 million. That number is conservative because Baldwin’s chart doesn’t include quarterbacks, and the Bears used the No. 1 overall pick on Williams in 2024. I projected the surplus value of the first pick in this year’s draft to be worth closer to $40 million per year. If you factor that in, the Panthers would be paying Young the equivalent of $50 million per season when including the surplus value of the picks they sent to acquire him. Ouch.
That’s still a lot less than the veterans, though. The Broncos sent two top-10 picks and two second-rounders to acquire Wilson and only got two years of middling play for their efforts. Throw another $29 million in surplus value onto the fire and that’s $153 million over two years for Wilson, or an average of $76.5 million per season.
And the Browns sent even more to acquire Watson, with the Texans adding three first-round picks as the highlight of their package. The surplus value of all the missing Browns picks amounts to more than $70 million, meaning he has cost Cleveland over $300 million for an orange-and-brown tenure marked by suspension, injury and struggles. Cleveland is on the hook for more than $60 million per year by that measure.
While Wilson was more expensive on a year-by-year basis and Young cost the Panthers a star receiver and their chance at Williams, I’d argue the Watson trade has been the worst of the three. The Panthers won’t have trouble moving on from the Young contract, and the Broncos were able to draw a line under the Wilson era after two years. Cleveland still has the better part of three years left with Watson as a toxic contract.