With a win on the final day of the regular season, the Carolina Panthers fell to the No. 8 spot in the 2025 NFL Draft.
That means the Panthers will likely be picking after Miami’s Cam Ward and Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders — the top two quarterback prospects in the draft — have been taken.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that plenty of arm talent is still available. The Panthers could trade down or possibly even wait until the second round to take Alabama’s Jalen Milroe, Texas’ Quinn Ewers or Georgia’s Carson Beck. Or, in an even later round, Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard and Ohio State’s Will Howard will be up for grabs.
That’s the good news. But here’s the even better news for the Carolina Panthers: It doesn’t look like they need to care which quarterbacks are on the board.
Following the Panthers’ overtime win in Atlanta to close out their 2024 season, owner David Tepper told the NFL Network, “I think we’ve got our quarterback here.”
A funny thing happened on Bryce Young’s journey to NFL Draft bust. The top pick in the 2023 draft, Young went to the Panthers, who traded a king’s ransom for the chance to choose him. After an unmitigated disaster of a rookie season, Young opened 2024 with a new coach—noted quarterback whisperer Dave Canales.
Two weeks into the season, however, Canales had seen enough, benching Young in favor of journeyman Andy Dalton. Young appeared to have regressed from his rookie year, showing a hesitancy to throw deep, uncertainty in the pocket and just general poor decision making.
At the time of his benching, Young had produced one touchdown drive in his last four games and had gone without a touchdown pass in eight of his last nine outings. If he wasn’t a full-blown bust, it was at least well on its way to being inflated.
NFL teams spend a small fortune, in salary, technology and manpower hours, to evaluate and develop quarterbacks. And, as observers seem to conclude each year following another draft, no one seems to know exactly what makes a quarterback succeed in the league.
Tom Brady, the consensus quarterback GOAT, was famously a skinny sixth-round pick who only got to play when New England’s starter was rushed to the hospital. There was no master plan or blueprint for success—just internal bleeding and a next-man-up mentality.
Young, on a seemingly irredeemable path to Bustville, had a similar fluke twist of fate turn him around.
For weeks, Canales had refused to speculate on when Young would get another chance or even what the quarterback had to do to earn that shot. There was little in the way of encouraging words, as the coach gave every sign that the team was ready to move on from their top pick.
Then Dalton picked up his kids from school and was heading to evening activities—“We were headed home,” he explained. “Gonna take them to a tennis lesson, then a baseball game.”
Instead, another driver t-boned their car. No one in the family was seriously injured, but Dalton suffered a sprained thumb that would keep him off the field that week.
Police didn’t release the name of the other driver in the collision, which likely is all that’s keeping him from picking up a few votes for Panthers’ 2024 team MVP. His fender bender helped put Bryce Young back on the road to success.
Young threw for two touchdowns that week against Denver and another one the following week against the Raiders, matching his total for his previous 13 games. It also started a streak of 10 straight games with at least one touchdown pass, which is still active headed into the offseason.
Young improved steadily and seemed to be at his best in the final weeks of the season. He finished the year with three straight multiple-touchdown games.
“How about Bryce?” Canales asked after the season finale. “To talk about just being able to call whatever I wanted to call on the call sheet, knowing that he was going to find a positive outcome. … And how freeing that is just to be able to call whatever fits that area, you know, not have to second guess the calls. He gave us that ability to do that.”
And the coach who had not had an encouraging word for his young quarterback in the early season, was asked about Young’s future.
“Well, I’d say we’ll take it week to week, but we’ve got no more weeks,” Canales said with a smile, his reputation as a QB guru once again intact. “So, yeah, Bryce is our quarterback. 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.”
Just the way the blueprint was drawn up all along.
