No. 1 overall pick Bryce Young’s debut did not go as planned for Carolina, as the Panthers lost to the Falcons 24-10.
Young finished the game 20-of-38 passing 146 yards with a touchdown and two interceptions. He was sacked twice and fumbled once, though he recovered the loose ball.
After the contest, head coach Frank Reich said he thinks Young will be just fine moving forward.
“Bryce is the last person I’m worried about — how he’ll handle this,” Reich said in his press conference. “He’s got the maturity of someone way beyond his years. He’s a team-first person. He’ll be hard on himself and each of us should be. That’s kind of the message that we talked about in there. Every one of us, players and coaches, should be hard on himself in the next 24 hours. It should not taste good, and we need to eat every bit of it. Otherwise, you don’t learn and get better from it.”
Reich added he’s really looking forward to going through the process of developing Young.
“There’s not another guy in the world I’d want to work with,” Reich said. “He’s got everything you want as a player, as a leader, as a person. I thought he did a lot of good things today. I mean, he did a lot of good things. He handled himself really well on the road in a division game.
“We’ll evaluate it play-by-play and see any mistakes that were made, just like we will with every other player on the team. And as coaches, we’ll evaluate ourselves. [I’m] looking forward to the ongoing opportunity because it’s a great opportunity to get to work with a player and a person like that.”
The Panthers will have another division game next week when they host the Saints on Monday night.
