With echoes of Cam Newton, Bryce Young leaves no doubt that the Panthers are his team now
I know that was actually Bryce Young on the field Sunday, leading the Carolina Panthers to a 44-38 overtime win over Atlanta with a career-best performance in the season finale.
I know it was Young accounting for five total touchdowns and outplaying everyone else in Atlanta.
But what I kept seeing — and what I kept thinking about — was Cam Newton.
For the very first time in his two years as the Panthers quarterback, Bryce reminded me of Cam so much Sunday it was eerie. It wasn’t just the five TDs, and the very Cam-esque ratio as to how he scored them (three pass, two rush).
It was the absolute joy Young played with all afternoon. It was the first-down symbol he kept throwing up, just like Newton used to. It was the jump pass he threw to Jalen Coker on that overtime touchdown drive (although, to be fair, that was more of a Patrick Mahomes special).
But most of all, it was Young’s 12-yard touchdown pass to Tommy Tremble on fourth-and-1, when he fired a strike and then turned around, his arms to the sky, before Tremble ever caught it in the end zone.
That was Steph Curry/Cam Newton showmanship at its finest. That was Young, showing some personality on a team that desperately needs its best players to grab the city of Charlotte by the lapels and say, “Pay attention to us again! We’re fun! Give us another chance!” Newton would later say on X that the play was “nasty” (in a good way, of course) and “Boogie Approved.”
Now let’s just get Young to work on a couple of things.
First, can someone get Young to spice up his postgame news conferences? He’s unfailingly pleasant and unfailingly dull there, even after five-TD games.
And secondly, starting with the first home game of the 2025 regular season, Bryce needs to re-institute Cam’s old tradition of handing all of his touchdown balls to a kid dressed in Carolina garb in the stands. That tradition needs to return, and Young now has the credentials and the pull to make it happen.
I’m quibbling here, though.
What we saw Sunday — and what we saw for much of the last two months of the season — was that the Panthers have a quarterback again, and an offensive system where he can thrive. (They actually have had some good QBs between Newton’s end and Young’s beginning, but Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield unfortunately had to go elsewhere to remind people they could play, too).
Head coach Dave Canales sounded almost giddy after the game when talking about Young. And that’s no small thing, because Canales has been very cautious with his words about Young all year, and he benched him after the first two games back when it seemed very much like Canales was ready to blow up the whole Bryce Young Experiment. Not anymore.
“Bryce is our quarterback,” Canales said Sunday. “I’m so proud of the way that he just took the challenge and he just grew every week. He just took new lessons, new things — applied it to his game. Was engaged, challenging the guys — you know, the whole thing.”
As for going into the offseason knowing that the starting quarterback position is set, Canales said: “It’s huge, you know. It’s a great feeling. It allows us to just look at the whole roster to see what the investments need to be. It helps us to think about free agency and the draft with the lens (of) knowing we got our guy (at quarterback).”
As Atlanta coach (for now) Raheem Morris said of Young, whose elusiveness has seemed to increase dramatically in the last two months: “We couldn’t tackle him. When we got back there and got to him, couldn’t get him on the ground.”
The No. 1 overall selection of the 2023 NFL Draft, Young still has a long way to go, most notably in terms of his winning percentage. The Panthers just finished the 2024 season with a 5-12 record. They went 2-15 in 2023, Young’s rookie year.
Young hasn’t started all of those games, but in the ones he has started, he’s 6-22. Plus, he still misses some wide open receivers every now and then. He still has too many empty possessions.
But his turnovers are down and his confidence is up. Those days when Canales declared every week that “Andy Dalton gives us our best chance to win” seem long ago (although in reality, it was as recently as October).
Young will go into Year 3 in Charlotte as a player on the rise, and the unquestioned starting QB for a Carolina team that badly needs to put most of its free agency money and draft capital into the defense.
Said Panthers wide receiver Adam Thielen of Young on Sunday: “He’s proved it. he’s earned it. And in this league you have to earn it.”
As for the Cam Newton comparison, let me be clear as to its limited scope. Young has never had a season remotely close to the sort Newton posted, year after year, from 2011-18. The fewest touchdown passes Newton threw in any of those seasons was 18; the most Young has had was 15, in the season just concluded.
But for at least this one Sunday, if you ignored the obvious height and weight differential, that could have been Cam Newton out there in Atlanta instead of Bryce Young. Until Sunday, Newton was the only Carolina player to finish a game with five total touchdowns (he did so three times in his NFL MVP year of 2015). Now Young has joined him.
Young threw for 251 yards Sunday, ran for 24 more, never came close to committing a turnover and led the Panthers to the most points they’ve scored in a game since they had 45 against Miami in 2017 with Newton at the controls. And that was against an Atlanta team that at the beginning of the day was in the NFC South hunt (although Tampa Bay would win it for the fourth consecutive season) and absolutely had to win the game.
Now Young just needs to play like that pretty much all the time. And Tremble, who caught the touchdown pass that Young didn’t see the end of, thinks he can. Of Young’s no-look celebration, Tremble said: “I heard he did it. That’s what ballers do. You’re a playmaker, man. You can throw stuff like that. He freaking just went off today.”
If Young can do anything close to that and the Carolina defense — which just set an all-time NFL record for most points allowed in a season Sunday with 534 and has been horrendous most of the year — simply gets 40% better, this has the potential to be a playoff team in 2025.
For now, though, the Panthers have to focus on getting a lot better. They just missed the playoffs for the seventh straight season. My daughter is a high school senior, and the Panthers have been irrelevant nationally since she was in elementary school. They’ve still got 99 problems.
But Bryce Young? He’s no longer one of them.
This story was originally published January 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
