What I learned From Missing on Bryce Young
Bryce Young has already flamed out. What can we learn for scouting future QB prospects.
So, the Carolina Panthers benched Bryce Young on Monday after just 18 starts. It’s hard to decide whether that is surprising or not.
On the one hand, he was the first-overall pick just one season ago, and the Panthers traded an insane haul for him. On the other hand, he has been historically bad since taking over, and things were only getting worse with an improved supporting cast.
I’m not here to debate whether Young should’ve been benched (I think it’s the right call, FWIW). Instead, I think looking at what we can learn from Young’s failure is more instructive.
Although I had C.J. Stroud QB1 in 2023, I still had a first-round grade on Young, and if you read my Summer QB Rankings, you know that’s something I don’t give out lightly. I liked Young coming out of Alabama, and I was wrong about how his game would translate to the next level.
Size Matters
Alright, let’s get the obvious one out of the way. Size matters when it comes to playing quarterback in the NFL. However, we on Draft Twitter tend to disregard the old-school NFL stereotypes.
There’s pressure in the draft community to be better than the league, and judging quarterbacks based on height and weight feels incredibly archaic — and it is. I mean, come on, we have all these advanced statistics, and you’re going to draft a quarterback because he’s 6-foot-3, 220?
However, there is no doubt that height and weight matter across the board. No, you shouldn’t draft a quarterback based solely on height and weight, but players who don’t meet NFL thresholds need to be met with more skepticism.
Look at Young’s measurables from the 2023 NFL Draft via MockDraftable.
Young wasn’t an outlier; he was the outlier. Looking at these numbers again and watching how much they limited Young on tape (here’s some evidence from last season) feels almost comical.
I was concerned about Young’s physical stature, but I sort of Jedi mind tricked myself into believing Young could be a franchise savior anyway. I fell into the trap of thinking I was smarter than conventional NFL wisdom.
Sometimes, it’s okay to look at the obvious problem staring you right in the face and accept it. That doesn’t mean you should blindly follow, but instead, just consider for a second that size thresholds exist for a reason.
Overvaluing Out Of Structure Play
Of all the reasons I missed on Young, this is the one I’m the most disappointed in myself about. Zach Wilson should’ve taught me this lesson in 2021!
I had Wilson as QB4 that year, but like Young, I still gave him a first-round grade. Like with Wilson, I used out-of-structure prowess as an excuse to hand wave away some of Young’s faults.
The NFL’s best quarterbacks are all winning out of structure. Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Lamar Jackson are dynamic when the play breaks down — why shouldn’t you look for that in a quarterback prospect?
Well, you should. However, it can’t excuse what a quarterback can do inside of structure. While it’s easy to get caught up in the flashy plays a quarterback makes when things break down, it’s not enough of the pie to cover up for obvious flaws.
Let’s look at Mahomes, who is probably the best out-of-structure player in NFL history. Of his 4,096 career dropbacks, only 669 have ended with him being outside of the pocket, according to PFF. That’s just 6.12 percent of his total dropbacks, which means roughly 94 percent of his dropbacks occur within the structure of the pocket.
Now, that number doesn’t account for things like designed rollouts and scrambles, so the number of out-of-structure throws is actually probably even lower. And again, that’s the best of all time.
Quarterbacking still — mostly — happens from the pocket, and the NFL’s most successful quarterbacks are as good at finding answers within the offense’s structure as they are out of it.
Bringing this back to Young, he was never that player at Alabama. All of Young’s answers to pressure, tight coverage, and poor offensive line play came out of structure.
That was never going to be a winning formula in the NFL, especially when you consider Young’s natural limitations (size + arm strength). This is not to say we shouldn’t consider out-of-structure play when scouting quarterbacks.
Elite quarterbacks must be capable of maximizing the 6 percent we talked about earlier. However, this cannot come at the expense of 94 percent. For Young, that was always the case.
He wasn’t as bad as Wilson was at BYU, but that’s an incredibly low bar to clear, and it should’ve been more of a red flag.
What Defines a QB’s Floor
When we talk about a quarterback’s floor, many people will point to completion percentage and football IQ. The idea is quarterbacks who are “accurate” and run pro-style concepts can keep an NFL offense on track.
Generally speaking, athletic quarterbacks who win with their legs are viewed as low-floor and high-ceiling players — think Anthony Richardson or Allen at Wyoming.
Young, of course, was the former. He completed 65.8 percent of his passes at Alabama, and he ran some pro-level concepts at an SEC school. Because of that — and other factors — he got the “most pro-ready” label among the top 2023 quarterbacks.
Obviously, that didn’t work out. Young actually looks/looked like the least pro-ready of the top 2023 quarterbacks. Stroud is a star, and Richardson and Levis have shown a lot more promise while having their own flaws.
Why are Levis, Richardson, and Stroud seeing varying degrees of success compared to Young? Yes, supporting casts are a factor, but it’s because those guys can fall back on their natural traits.
Richardson is arguably the NFL’s most athletic quarterback. Levis has a cannon for an arm and can run a little bit. Stroud has tremendous arm talent and is more athletic than some gave him credit for in the pre-draft process.
However, all three were viewed as more raw than Young. I think this likely comes from how quarterbacks were evaluated in the pre-Mahomes era. Teams were less willing to accommodate athletic quarterbacks and/or dumb down their offense.
For years, NFL teams tried to fit square pegs into round holes. That meant teams preferred quarterbacks who stood in the pocket and completed passes, and the quality of those completions didn’t matter as much.
Simply put, we need to stop looking at things like completion percentage and whether a quarterback runs traditional pro-style concepts as what sets their floor. Instead, it should be athletic ability and arm strength.
The quarterback scramble is one of the most valuable plays in football. Including 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024, the NFL average for EPA per dropback on quarterback scrambles was 0.43.
The average EPA per dropback on all plays in the same time frame is -0.02. Brock Purdy, who led the league in EPA per dropback last season, averaged just 0.24 EPA per dropback in the same time frame.
NFL offenses have changed so much, and offensive line play has gotten worse. Teams are more willing than ever to accommodate passers who like to run, and quarterbacks have to run more than ever because protection is worse.
Young shouldn’t have been viewed as a high-floor player because the NFL has changed. It’s time to make the traditional field general archetype the high-risk prospects, not the athletes with cannon arms.
Conclusion
That was a lot of word vomit, so what does it mean?
Simply put, be more skeptical of physical outliers (size matters). Out-of-structure play is important for setting a quarterback’s ceiling, but young quarterbacks can’t bank on that making them successful. What they can bank on is their natural athletic ability keeping things on the track while they develop the rest of their game.
These shouldn’t override all quarterback scouting tenants. Each prospect is different. Not every limited athlete has a low floor, and not every elite athlete has a high one. Small quarterbacks can be successful, but they must be special runners with impressive arms (so pretty much exactly Kyler Murray).
But we have to better about how willing we are to accept those outliers and how we define high-floor quarterback prospects — myself included.