Things have gone quite poorly for Carolina Panthers rookie quarterback and No. 1 overall pick Bryce Young. However, a visit from the Green Bay Packers’ porous pass defense may just be the perfect remedy.
The Panthers sit at 2-12 on the season with one of the worst offenses in football, ranking 29th in points per game scored with 14.7 and 30th in yards per game at just 270.9.
Young, meanwhile, is completing only 59.4 percent of his passes at 5.3 yards per attempt, which is 41st out of 41 eligible quarterbacks entering Week 16. Young has thrown only nine touchdowns, while his nine interceptions are the 12th-most, and he’s thrown the seventh-most turnover-worthy passes.
“I think like a lot of rookies there’s moments that are really good and moments that can be trying, especially at that position,” coach Matt LaFleur said Wednesday. “The focus so many times and there’s a big spotlight on that position, but it’s not always about that position. It’s about the other 10 men around him and how well they are playing as well.”
Facing a struggling rookie quarterback — who is lacking playmakers around him in the passing game and playing behind an offensive line that ranks fourth in sacks allowed — the Packers defense should have a recipe for a much-needed bounce-back performance. The key word in all of that is should.
Over the last two weeks, the NFC Player of the Week on offense has been the quarterback of Green Bay’s opponents. In Week 14, it was New York’s Tommy DeVito, who despite playing behind one of the worst offensive lines in football, wasn’t sacked even one time.
DeVito would go on to throw only four incompletions on 21 pass attempts, along with a touchdown, and he rushed for an additional 71 yards while leading a game-winning field goal drive as time expired.
In Green Bay’s most recent outing, Tampa Bay quarterback Baker Mayfield was nearly perfect–and if you go by his quarterback rating, he was perfect. Mayfield completed 22-of-28 passes for 381 yards and four touchdowns. A combination of very soft zone coverage from the Packers coupled with the Bucs seemingly knowing where the Green Bay defenders were going to be led to a game of pitch-and-catch for Mayfield and his pass-catchers.
Despite the recent breakdowns defensively over the last two games, not to mention Joe Barry’s body of work over nearly three seasons as defensive coordinator, Matt LaFleur said on Monday that the team was not moving on from him at this time. However, one would think a loss to Carolina or even a good performance by Young and the Panthers offense could be the final reluctant straw for LaFleur when it comes to Barry’s tenure with the team.
Along with putting the blame on the coaching staff, the overarching theme from LaFleur during his media availability on the Monday after the Bucs’ game was that the communication on the back-end has to improve, even saying he was “dumbfounded” by what took place. That lack of communication or flat out miscommunication led to defenders being out of position, not knowing where they were supposed to be, and resulted in big plays for the Tampa Bay offense.
“I’ve got to be more present with those guys,” said LaFleur on Monday, “and making sure we are all on the same page. Football is, if you don’t have all 11 on the same page, obviously it starts with our staff. Making sure all our coaches are in lock step, but if you don’t have all 11 on the same page, it takes one guy and then everything goes to crap after that and you get exposed. And unfortunately, we got exposed in a really bad way.”
It hasn’t led to an abundance of success by any means for Young, but the majority of his targets go to the middle of the field on short to intermediate routes, according to PFF, which is where a lot of easy catch-and-run opportunities that move the chains or explosive plays have happened against this Green Bay defense if they choose to play off coverage—which they often do.
If there were ever a game where we would see a more aggressive version of this Packers’ defense under Barry, one would think this is it. Young has one game with a passer rating over 100.0, one game with more than one touchdown pass, and just four games with more than 200 passing yards.
Between the matchup and the situation Barry finds himself in, it’s now or never. The defense needs to do the dictating, rather than being so reactionary.
“We had a great meeting on Monday,” said LaFleur. “A very open forum where anybody could speak. There were some things that were said. We’re all about finding solutions. How can we best communicate with one another. It starts with myself and goes down to Joe and down to our players. Then on the field we need everybody communicating. So obviously that’s a big time point of emphasis that we understand not only what we are doing but why we are doing it.”
