Carolina started a voluntary minicamp under coach Dave Canales on Tuesday, and the Panthers’ first day on the field with their new leader meant school was in session for the NFL team’s quarterback, former Alabama All-American Bryce Young.
“There’s a process,” Canales said after the workout. “There’s a QB school that he’s going through, and as we do it, the things he needs specifically to improve on, that’s the lens that we look at stuff with.”
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The quarterback school starts with the basics, such as the stance, footwork inventory and the offense’s five types of reads.
“I think if we can get all on the same page with the language – again, new offense, new terms – so it all starts there,” Canales said. “And if we can communicate, we speak the same language, we can build anything pretty fast.”
Canales isn’t concerned about overwhelming Young because he trusts “the process that we’ve taken all the guys through” – the guys including Russell Wilson and Geno Smith with the Seattle Seahawks and Baker Mayfield with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where Canales was the offensive coordinator last season.
“We know that that’s a lot, but we know that it leads to great results,” Canales said. “And so we’re just trusting it one day at a time, and then we just kind of add different layers of concepts, protections, runs, tool-belt answers, things like that, we will continue to add. We’ll do that twice the whole thing through this spring. We’ll hit it again twice through training camp and preseason, so that’s four times total going through the whole system by the time we get to playing games in a season.”
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Young might have a jump on learning Canales’ playbook from seeing it so much during the 2023 season. Because the Panthers and Buccaneers are members of the NFC South, Young saw plenty of video of Canales’ offense while studying opposing defenses.
“Obviously, same division, so we played the same opponents, so watched them pretty much every week,” Young said on Tuesday. “I was really excited. Just from watching tape, you feel like you know a little bit about the offense, and I was honestly excited to hear the specifics. Sometimes you see stuff on tape, like, ‘That’s cool that worked. I wonder what they told them; I wonder what the thought process was.’ And then already now seeing some plays on tape, I’m like, ‘I remember that play. That makes sense now how this happened or how it played out.’ I’m excited, and being able to talk to him’s been great.”
Young had crossed paths with Canales at the NFL Scouting Combine last year before Carolina made the quarterback the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft.
“He had asked me a question about an adjustment that I made toward the end of my last year in college,” Young said. “And it stuck with me because that was like the most attentive question that I got. It was a very specific – it was something, like, mechanical, but it was something, like a change that I made that I realized throughout the year. It was something really cool because I was like, ‘Yeah, I actually did. I had a meaning behind it. I had a purpose why I changed this.’ And we had a conversation about it.
“And it was just really a cool moment, and also just goes to show the attention to detail that he has. And that was last year. They were in a different situation. He was kind of just doing that research to do it at the time, and he still had that attention to detail, which meant a lot, and obviously it makes a lot of sense being able to work with him now is how detail-oriented he is, how much of things tying together and all that, so again, it’s just another thing that makes me more excited.”
Young said excitement is something that Canales exudes.
“The first phone call from all the way till now, you can tell,” Young said. “He just has that energy, that excitement. He just brings juice every day. That rubs off, not just on offense, on the whole team, and really the whole building.
“Everyone being in here just working, there’s a different juice, a different vibe, and we all kind of have that excitement to be here, to want to be better and want to accomplish our goals, so it’s super exciting.”
Young and the Panthers have a new coach because Carolina posted the worst record in the NFL in 2023 at 2-15.
“Last year is what it is,” Young said. “There’s learning, there’s growing and we’ve talked about it, but right now we’re focused on the future, so it’s all learning the offense, learning the people around us, getting these reps on the field, getting the chemistry down. Really, right now, all we’re doing is focusing on this year.”
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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.