Carolina Panthers: Bryce Young regressing?

Cash prizes every day, adds up when you play at Pulse Casino. Puls.com, over 700 casino-style games and counting, and no terrible lounge singer, promise.

Hey, that's pretty mean. There's always a new reason to play. Cash prizes every day of the week. P-U-L-S-Z.com. Pulse in your pocket, you can play anywhere.

P-U-L-S-Z.com. Right now it is time to talk about Bryce Young and the progress that he has made as the quarterback for the Carolina Panthers to help me do that. A quarterback, Tim Donnelly. If we had a flag football team, you would be the quarterback. I think I could do pretty well in a flag football situation.

You would have nobody to throw to, just like Bryce. He of course does the Afternoon Show. That's why you are who you are right there.

Here on 99.9 The Fan. Can I tell you that I just absolutely stumbled into that? If you told me you had been writing it for weeks, I would have believed you. No, it doesn't work that way as you know.

Alright, so I am team Bryce. I understand that CJ Stroud has had a great year and I get all of it, but I am not ready to say, oh man the Panthers blew it. I don't think they did, but we don't know.

They may have. But he certainly hasn't gotten better this year. So from your eye, you played the position. Has he regressed? I think the bigger problem is what you mentioned. It doesn't look like he has gotten better. It is completely fair to say you can't accurately judge him against someone like CJ Stroud because Tank Dell ended up being an awesome receiver that they got in the middle of the draft.

Nico Collins leveled up as a wide receiver. So it is completely fair to say you can't compare CJ Stroud to Bryce Young because look at the dumpster fire Bryce Young is dealing with. I do think it is fair to say, can we compare Bryce Young with the dumpster fire of the Panthers to Bryce Young with the dumpster fire of the Panthers three months later.

So if you played New Orleans week 2 and you played New Orleans week 14 and it doesn't look better and maybe even looks worse, I think that is a fair comparison to make. I said this on my show, he has to get better at being in a bad offense. If he threw the ball away on first, second and third down, just threw it three rows in the stands. But you go back and watch the film and you say nobody was open and the pocket was collapsing around him and the right play on all three of those was to throw it away.

I am good. Is that a good offense? No, that is a horrendous offense. Your defense is going to be very upset but that is the right play so just get better at being bad.

I just want to challenge that very quickly because I think in general you are right. But at some point you have to try to make a play. Yes, actually throwing it away probably was for a little bit of comedic effect but putting the ball where only your wide receiver could get it and if it is incomplete it is incomplete. If you do that three times and you can't hold on and wait for these guys to get open forever because your offensive line is not going to give you that time, you might not even be able to hang on to it for half of forever.

Like a quarter of a forever. So on fourth and two, they had plenty of fourth and twos and he does the deep shot to DJ Shark. The pass was not perfect. I don't know that it was supposed to be back shoulder. It wasn't even really back shoulder because it wasn't on the back side of him. But am I wrong in thinking how do you not catch that DJ? It hit you in both hands.

It was not deflected before it got to you. Don't you have to catch that? Yes, and this is not said mean-spiritedly unless you are DJ Shark.

Okay, good point. If the wide receivers aren't good enough to make those plays, they aren't good enough to make those plays. Depending on DJ Shark and a brand new Jonathan Mingo to be your big play wide receivers is part of the problem, right?

I do feel like you need to, and I use this example a lot, you know like the 90s sitcom trope where all of a sudden you're like, freeze, and everything freezes? I bet you're wondering how I got here, right? If the Panthers did that, freeze, I bet you're wondering how we ended up 1-12 with all this negative and we fired a coach.

Well, it took a lot of little steps to get there. One of them is thinking this wide receiver core was good enough. And thinking Bryce Young as a rookie was advanced enough to raise their level. When in actuality he needs receivers that are going to, like you said, that throw, I don't know what his goal was. Could have just been three yards under thrown.

Could have been a back shoulder that he missed to the inside. Like I don't know what his intent was on the throw, but he needed a receiver to make a play for him. And that's why, you know, if you look at Jalen Hurts, if you look at Josh Allen, if you look at some of these other quarterbacks that have really leveled up, it's no surprise that Josh Allen got a lot better when he got Stephon Diggs. Who they don't even use anymore. True.

Whole other conversation there. Jalen Hurts got a lot better when they got him A.J. Brown. Tua Tungovailoa, who I think shares a lot of skills with Bryce Young, got a lot better when they got him Tyreek Hill. Sometimes you need a guy to make a play for you, and if Bryce is throwing it up going, please make a play for me, and it's towards D.J. Chark or Jonathan Mingo, they're just not ready to bail him out.

If you were Bryce Young, would you throw to anybody not named Adam Thielen, ever? Uh, they'd have me. Cash prizes every day. Ads up when you play at Pulse Casino. Pulse.com, over 700 casino-style games and counting, and no terrible lounge singer, promise.

Hey, that's pretty mean. There's always a new reason to play. Cash prices every day of the week. P-U-L-S-Z.com. Pulse in your pocket, you can play anywhere. P-U-L-S-Z.com. No purchase necessary, Boyd where prohibited by law. 18 plus, terms and conditions apply.

See website for details. Pretty open. I mean, they'd have to be, I'd have to be able, and he's an accurate guy when the guys are open. I'd have to be able to, you know, put it on their chest, you know, face mask style throws. Like, that was one of my coaches, a high school coach used to say, if your receivers can't catch, bounce it off their face mask and they won't blame you. Right. So, like, it's got to be kind of that for Bryce Young. Like, if I'm throwing it to some of these guys, I'm going to bounce it off your face mask.

That way, none of the internet trolls, none of the Twitter tape experts, if you watch the ball bounce off someone's face mask and blame the quarterback, then we're not going to be able to help you, right? A couple of things. We have about four minutes left with Tim Donnelly. His show is called The Drive.

It's on right after us in Raleigh here on 99.9 The Fan. There was an article written in The Athletic by Joe Person, who's a friend of ours. He's on a lot. And Diana Rossini, national NFL writer. They collaborated on this and it's pretty damning about all the all the dysfunction. How much of that has negatively impacted Bryce?

A lot. And what it is, is I talk about the my own coined term here. The four horsemen of a franchise are the owner, the GM, the head coach and the quarterback. And those four have to trust each other with their lives. Right.

Like, hey, I'm jumping off this this building. You hold the rope style trust. And when you see like assistant coaches going around one of those steps or a GM going around and all of this is in that article, the head coach to complain to the owner, that's one of those four horsemen kind of being nudged out of that trust tree.

And Bryce is further down the tree than Frank Reich. Right. So the fact that he wasn't able to go to the GM and the head coach separately and have like honest conversations because you don't know what he's going to say. Right.

It turns into like that high school thing. Right. I heard from Jimmy that Tommy's mad at Billy. And that is just so bad for a young quarterback who needs to know everybody in these positions of power are all in on me.

They're all in on the plan and I'm trusting the plan. Very different from his days at Alabama. Right. Exactly. When actually those first three were all Nick Saban. Right. And you could argue, yeah, he was the only one that wasn't. Saban, Saban, Saban, Bryce.

So it's pretty simple. Here's what's interesting to me about this issue that they had based on that article. David Tepper was probably wrong to hire Frank Reich, but maybe not wrong to hire Frank Reich, but maybe wrong to hire Frank and then tell him, I want you to get all of these different types of coaches. Maybe he should have just let Frank hire who he wanted to hire. And there would have been more familiarity and more trust because it's hard to build trust and then blend all different offenses. This is an overcorrection mistake by Tepper. We see it happen when they hire like a 30 year old offensive coordinator as a head coach and it flames out. The next coach is always like a 60 year old been in the NFL 30 years defensive coordinator. Right. You overcorrect. He hired Matt Rule.

Didn't work. And you can very obviously see David Tepper said, oh, the problem was we didn't have enough NFL experience with that coach. So he went got a retried coach and he went and got Caldwell and he went and got all these guys that have been in the league forever. I would have just hired Caldwell, but that's me. The whole again, there have been some logic there, but he went and and almost solved one problem so well that he created all of these other problems. He was like, I'm not going to have an inexperienced staff ever again. So I want 250 years of NFL experience on my roster or on my coaching staff and they got it. But then the problem with that is you didn't put into account if they liked each other or if they agreed with each other or if they all wanted Bryce or anything.

Philosophically, all of these things were very difficult to blend. And again, go check out the athletic article written by Joe Person and Diana Rossini. Final thing. Did they set him up to fail simply because the roster was never good enough? Who's the hem, Bryce or Frank?

Both Bryce and Frank. Did Scott fitter ultimately set everybody up to fail? Yes. If the expectations were to win this year, anything significant? I mean, just getting the six wins would have been amazing. Yes, exactly. And, you know, if, you know, they're always with this roster, there always was the possibility of a one win.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was there was always that you needed to have a good coaching job and have a couple players stay healthy. Couple players develop in ways that maybe we weren't expecting, like this was always a possibility. So to to fire Frank Reich and and or look at Bryce Young as some kind of lost cause, you're probably saying your expectations were too high coming into this year. And for the next coach, I would say, hey, like 2027, I think we could have a pretty good team.

Anything before that is going to be we're going to need some luck. I would appreciate the honesty of David Tepper or whoever came in next would say that, because I look at the roster and I realize I might be looking at this from a completely negative point of view. I think they are minimum three drafts away from being you can win the division next year because eight wins might be enough to win this division. I think eight wins will win it this year. But eight wins is a mountain for this this roster. It's a mountain for this roster. But to be good, eight wins is not good to be some some a team that can challenge 10 or 11 wins. I mean, they're minimum three years away. So as as we said, they all they all stunk.

They need Nick Saban. And yeah, the blame game is dangerous. Everybody gets their share. It's not I'm blaming this person. It's I take this slice, you take this slice, you get the big slice. Like everybody's got their share. P.U.L.S.E. dot com.