Bleacher Report put Bryce Young on bust watch this July, two months before he took a single snap in 2026. The stat they used to justify it came from the same season that was supposed to have ended the argument.
Young was benched after an 0-2 start to the 2024 season, 245 yards, zero touchdowns, and three interceptions combined across those two games, and Andy Dalton took the job. That version of him is the one national media has never fully let go of. 2025 said otherwise. He threw for 3,011 yards and 23 touchdowns, won eight games, took Carolina to an NFC South title and a playoff berth under Dave Canales, and turned in the best season of his career by every measure that matters.
None of that stopped the Big Lead’s July 11 bust-watch column from citing Carolina’s 26th-ranked team passing offense and a 2026 schedule loaded with the Bears, Eagles, Broncos, and Seahawks as reasons this season would go sideways. That ranking is real, and it’s from 2025, the same 3,011-yard, 23-touchdown season the same piece calls his best. Nobody explained how an offense finishes 26th in total passing yards the year its quarterback has a career year; the number just happened to keep the story going, so in it went.
Bust watch operates like a mechanic who checks the odometer but never turns the key; the car might run fine, but the inspection only records whatever’s easiest to screenshot. A team’s total passing yards is shaped by game script and play-calling as much as by the man throwing it; a fourth quarter spent bleeding clock with a lead subtracts pass attempts a quarterback never asked to lose. Bleacher Report had the number that actually isolates Young sitting in the same piece, 3,011 yards, 23 touchdowns, a division title, and reached past it for the one that let the story stay the same anyway.
Two weeks into the season that inspection was supposedly warning everyone about, Young has thrown for 648 yards, second-most in the NFL, and six touchdowns, tied for the league lead. The same story notes his air yards per attempt jumped from 6.9 last season to 10.2 this one, and his deep-pass rate more than doubled, from 7.1 percent to 15.1. The quarterback the industry filed under safe, limited, and schedule-dependent is now pushing the ball downfield at a rate he never approached in the season that supposedly proved his ceiling.
Compare that to the company he’s not supposed to be in. Patrick Mahomes has 566 passing yards and five touchdowns through two games. Josh Allen is around 582 yards and five passing scores; his rushing production is a separate ledger that has nothing to do with the passing numbers Young is outproducing him in. Lamar Jackson followed a strong Week 1 with a rough one in New Orleans, 235 yards, one touchdown, one interception, and his two-week total trails Young’s on both counts. Three former or presumptive MVPs, and the guy who got a bust watch in July is ahead of all of them.
Job security in that quarterback tier has never been distributed evenly. Mahomes skipping all of preseason and starting anyway reads as a rest plan for a guy with three rings; a benching for anyone without that resume reads as an audition. Even the Vikings benching J.J. McCarthy this year over durability questions got framed as due diligence, not panic. Young got benched once, after a single bad start, and it became the defining data point of his career for a full calendar year afterward.
StatMuse ran the actual numbers against the three quarterbacks Young is supposedly still chasing, and it wasn’t close in his favor:
https://twitter.com/statmuse/status/2102435000801259807
Nobody at Bleacher Report owes a correction, and nobody’s going to write one. The bust-watch business runs on volume, not accuracy: publish the epitaph in July, then see whether amnesia or credit shows up first before moving to the next name on the list.
The neater version of this story says the same people who left Young for dead will spend Thanksgiving pretending they believed in him the whole time. That’s close, except the timeline is worse than it sounds; the inspection had his best season sitting right there and still filed the wrong verdict, and it took two weeks of actual football to make it look ridiculous. Whatever gets written about him next season won’t reference this one, because remembering isn’t the business model.
