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| Wednesday, July 24, 2024 |
| It's Panthers Day! |
| Before diving into Fantasy analysis for each team, I'll present a brief overview containing their offensive ranks in my base line team projections as well as any notable coaching or offensive line changes. |
| Projected Offensive Plays – (31st) |
| Projected Passing TDs – 21.2 (27th) |
| Projected Rushing TDs – 17.0 (22nd) |
| Notable coaching changes: |
| Dave Canales takes over as head coachHarold Goodwin joins Canales in the journey from Tampa Bay to Carolina and will work as assistant head coach/run game coordinatorBrad Idzik also comes over from the Bucs to take over as Carolina's new offensive coordinator |
| Idzik was the wide receivers coach in Tampa. Canales is the coach who inspires the most confidence, as we have seen him associated with career rescues for Geno Smith and Baker Mayfield. So, of course, Carolina getting him to work with Bryce Young is exciting. |
| Canales served just one season as the offensive coordinator for Tampa before getting a head coaching gig. In his 2023 Bucs OC debut, Tampa ranked 13th in situation-neutral pass rate and was middle of the pack in pre-snap motion and play action rate. That might not sound exciting, but it's still a significant upgrade over last year's Panthers direction, which led Carolina to the 28th-ranked motion rate and 30th-ranked play action rate. |
| Here's why this is important: |
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| Notable offensive line changes |
Signed veteran guards Damien Lewis and Robert HuntSigned tackle Yosh Nijman
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| There were 20 different tackles who allowed 40+ pressures in 2023, two of them -- right tackle Taylor Morton and sixth-overall pick from the 2022 NFL Draft Ikem Ekwonu -- played for the Panthers and are projected to start again in 2024. Believe it or not, those two had the best PFF grades of any Panthers linemen. The interior of the line was hugely problematic but will look completely different in Bryce Young's second season. |
| Hunt has been one of the NFL's best guards over the past two seasons as a Miami Dolphin, and the Panthers signed him to a five-year, $100 million deal with $63 million guaranteed. He's a massive upgrade for this team. Lewis was given $26.2M guaranteed on a four-year, $53M contract. These investments signal that Austin Corbett will transition to center. Corbett is a former Round 2 pick who had three seasons of sustained success from 2020-2022 before injuries slowed him down in 2023. |
| The middle of the line should be shored up. There's tons of talent at the tackle spot. And if either tackle struggles or is injured, swing tackle Yosh Nijman performed well when given opportunities with the Packers. This is at least a league-average line from a talent perspective and could be a top-10 unit if Ekwonu takes a step forward in his third season. |
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| Can Bryce Young bounce back? |
| There have been 22 quarterbacks drafted in Round 1 to post a lower rookie season passer rating than Young. You can find that prestigious list below. |
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| The next list displays the career passer rating for this group. |
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| Three of these quarterbacks were able to salvage their career and live up to the elite upside that an NFL franchise saw when investing a Round 1 pick. A few more recovered enough to still have an okay career relative to expectations. The vast majority of these quarterbacks were simply busts, though. |
| Some good context from Heath Cummings -- the league average passer rating has risen with time, so we're not exactly comparing apples to apples here. |
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| Adjusting for the era makes Young's placement historically feel even worse. This is of course unscientific, but if we use three of 22 success stories to create a probability for Young to turn his career around, that's just a measly 14% chance. After all that Carolina has done this offseason to better position Young for success, I want to believe that his chances of turning things around are higher than 14%. History does not tell an encouraging tale, though. |
| It wasn't just that his productivity was bad, every stat suggests that Young was completely overwhelmed as a rookie. His off-target rate was the fifth-lowest among 20 rookie quarterbacks with 10+ games as a starter, dating back to 2017. Only Zach Wilson, Deshone Kizer, Justin Fields, and Josh Allen had worse rates. |
| Everything was bad in Carolina last year. Let's try to find some positives. |
| Okay, so this might not sound like a positive. Bear with me. Young had the worst sack to pressure rate in the NFL as a rookie. That's a problem, right?! |
| Well, as we already know, Carolina's line was a huge problem. Young was one of five quarterbacks to be pressured on over 40% of his dropbacks. He actually led the NFL in sacks avoided, which is the "positive" that I wanted to highlight. At the collegiate level, pocket navigation was a strength of Young's. |
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| Young had to lean on this strength far too much to have any hope of operating a functional offense in 2023. Even when he avoided the first potential sack, Young often ended up sacked anyway. Nobody was open! |
| Nobody was open. Adam Thielen had the highest ESPN Open Score of any Panther, 62 out of 100, ranking 37th in the NFL. The next-highest Panther, amazingly, ranked 112th. Jonathan Mingo and D.J. Chark ranked 152nd and 143rd out of 153 qualifiers (shoutout DeVante Parker for holding down that 153rd spot, nice try Mingo). |
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| Diontae Johnson is open! |
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| I would bet that you probably have takes on Diontae. I won't assume anything about you, of course, but so many people out here have takes about Diontae. |
| Whatever you might think, I want you to consider that your Diontae Johnson takes might be influenced by a career spent with a well past cooked Ben Roethlisberger and then an undercooked Kenny Pickett with a table set by Matt Canada, truly the single worst NFL play-caller that I have spent time evaluating. Consider that it might at least be possible that Johnson deserves a bit of grace in the same way that Drake London, Kyle Pitts, Garrett Wilson, and other young players enduring nearly impossible circumstances do. |
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| ESPN's Open Score is far from the only metric that paints Johnson as a premier player when it comes to creating separation and presenting an open target for passers. Matt Harmon's work with Reception Perception has shown Johnson to be one of the best route runners in the league throughout his career. In 2023, he earned the vaunted all-green route tree status. |
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| Full Diontae Johnson Reception Perception Profile |
| Another clear indication of his ability to get open can be found in Johnson's target rates. The excerpt below is from a previous newsletter titled, "Fantasy football fun with per-route data!" |
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| Xavier Legette's talent is extremely intriguing |
| If Johnson is going to be used more on short targets and post truly dominant target shares in the way that we've seen him do in the past, rookie Round 1 selection Xavier Legette is going to be a big part of positioning his veteran teammate for success. If Legette is able to fill the "X" receiver role for the Steelers, Johnson could be freed up to roam around the formation more and be used in more creative ways by Canales. |
| That would be asking a lot of Legette as a rookie, in my opinion. He played 41% of his snaps as the "X" receiver at South Carolina in 2023 and was more efficient when out of the "X" than when lined up there. By the way, if you're curious about the "X" receiver spot and how it affects Fantasy football, I put together a cool Twitter thread about it recently. |
| If only hoping for Legette's Fantasy opportunity to be maximized, we should hope for him to be moved around the formation and used as a catch-and-run option as well as a deep threat. He was used in a variety of ways in his fifth season at South Carolina and won in almost all of those situations. Legette is a superior athlete and was older than almost everyone he faced in his fifth season, so it's fair to question how well his game might translate against better talent at the NFL level. I believe that his unproductive initial four seasons at South Carolina can be easily explained , and everything that I found in his 2023 data profile has me very excited to see Legette as a pro. He does not project to be a Fantasy-relevant player as a rookie in an offense that Vegas lookahead lines have second-to-last in projected points scored in 2024, but Legette at least does offer some reasons for optimism in his collegiate data. That was something we could not say about Jonathan Mingo at this time last year. |
| Jonathan Brooks paired with Canales could be awesome for Fantasy |
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| Brett Kollman of Bootleg Football compared Jonathan Brooks to Alvin Kamara, and a similar career outcome is within the range of outcomes for him. He's a very exciting receiving prospect, and the pairing with Canales feels perfect. |
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| We're still in wait-and-see mode when it comes to health for Brooks as he recovers from a torn ACL, so I haven't known how to project his season-long totals. I did form a late-season projection for him under the assumption that he would hit his stride in recovering to full health at some point in 2024, and it is exciting. |
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| On a per-game basis, with a projection of a 58% share of the total rush attempts, a 45% share of the rushing touchdowns, a target share of 14.5% and a 10% share of the receiving touchdowns, Brooks scores 16.6 PPR points per game at full health in my model. My projections are not bullish on the Panthers. This offense is not projected to do much, given the low implied win total and points scored. Brooks just projects for really exciting usage in the passing game. For reference, 16.6 PPR points per game would have ranked in between Travis Etienne and Jahmyr Gibbs as the RB7 in 2023. |
| I'm drafting a lot of Brooks across all formats. It will likely be a slow start that requires patience as his role ramps up, but there's exciting usage upside available to him if he earns an every-down role. The talent is clearly there, too, and Carolina's offense may perform better than projection models can account for. Models are going to be so heavily weighed down by Young's awful rookie season. If the former number one overall selection performs better in Year 2 with a drastically different supporting cast, this offense could be one of the best sources of Fantasy football value. |
| I'll be back in your inbox every weekday with a new team preview during the month of July and into the first week of August! Thursday, we will be covering the New Orleans Saints. If you have any feedback on the team-by-team previews or any questions about the upcoming teams, feel free to send them my way. |
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