Bryce Young has his origin story now.
Every quarterback needs one. It’s that moment in the movie where things look bleak, right before the heroic music picks up and the success montage begins.
Think Kurt Warner stocking supermarket shelves while playing indoor football. Or Tom Brady arriving at Michigan as the No. 7 quarterback on the depth chart. It’s Joe Montana, leading his 49ers onto the Super Bowl field for one last-ditch comeback attempt, and happens to see John Candy in the crowd.
For Bryce Young, it was when a rookie safety for the Atlanta Falcons sacked him, and he didn’t get up.
The player who sacked Young was Billy Bowman Jr., which sounds like a made-up name—a fresh-faced All-American boy next door. Certainly not the name of someone who would go around knocking quarterbacks out of games.
Through the first half-season of his NFL career, he did nothing to alter that perception. The fourth-round draft pick for Atlanta out of Oklahoma entered the game against the Panthers with 22 career tackles, or one every 10 snaps or so. He’d never had a tackle for loss, was credited with a half of a sack and had one quarterback hit through six games.
Bowman came from the secondary, untouched through the line, however. He grabbed Young around the chest and dragged him to the turf, ending Carolina’s second drive of the game.
As Bowman celebrated his way out of the Bryce Young story, the title character rolled around on his back, clearly in a great deal of pain. He ripped off his helmet as the training staff knelt by his side. He was taken to the locker room, and backup Andy Dalton began to get loose on the sideline.
That’s when the music swells. Young returned from the locker room during the tail end of Atlanta’s next drive. The Panthers listed him as questionable to return. While the Fox sideline reporter was still reading that statement on air, Young was making a liar of her, leading the offense onto the field without missing a snap.
“He said, ‘I’m good’,” said Panthers coach Dave Canales. “He gave me a thumbs up and said, ‘I’m good’. I said, ‘That’s good enough for me’. He was getting back out there, and Andy [Dalton] was ready. Andy was warming up and ready to go out for that series.”
That’s what the Warners, Bradys and Montanas do. They beat the odds, and, along the way, they lift up the entire team.
“I was fired up,” said Canales. “It was like, okay, let’s go.”
As the story gets retold, Young’s turnaround will get exaggerated, but he was already having a pretty good game when he got sacked by Bowman. He was 8-of-9 for 82 yards and a touchdown through two drives. His first pass after returning to the game was an incompletion, on his way to a three-and-out series.
The Panthers trailed, 21-10 at the half.
Young opened the second half with eight straight completions and led the Panthers on a comeback. With 1:15 left in the game, he found rookie receiver Tetairoa McMillan for a 12-yard touchdown. That was two plays after a 38-yard touchdown to Rico Dowdle was ruled out at the 10-yard-line on review.
Then, in overtime, his only completion was a 54-yard pass to Tommy Tremble to set up the game-winning kick. It was the longest connection with a Carolina tight end since 2017 and it gave Young 448 yards on the day, 16 more than Cam Newton’s team record, set in 2011.
It also gave Young a tenth game-winning drive in the last three years. That’s more than anyone else in the NFL over that span. Josh Allen? Patrick Mahomes? Jalen Hurts? Nine each, along with Geno Smith.
He did it, despite getting sacked a total of five times on the day—twice on fourth down, and a sixth time on a two-point conversion attempt that didn’t count in the official stats. Each of those hits sent him to the turf and forced him to struggle back up on his unsteady ankle.
“He was dealing with some stuff,” Canales said. “The ankle that flared up a couple times and they checked it out, and they made sure that everything was structurally fine. At that point, it was just a pain tolerance thing, and he gutted it out. He wanted to do that for his teammates. I’m just really proud of the way that he stepped in there and made the plays when we needed him to.”
It also gave him his origin story. Now we all watch where that story goes from here.
