Bryce Young’s 2026 Hot Start: Is His Performance Sustainable?

Through the first two games of this year, Carolina Panthers quarterback Bryce Young has completed 46 of 73 passes (63.0%) for 648 yards (8.9 per attempt), six touchdowns and one interception. The six passing touchdowns are tied for the league lead, and the 648 yards are second to only Tyler Shough .

Young ranks sixth in the NFL in passer rating, seventh in ESPN's QBR and sixth in Pro Football Focus' passing grades. He also checks in seventh in the league in EPA per dropback, according to TruMedia, and seventh in completion percentage over expected, per NFL.com's Next Gen Stats.

Those numbers are all a far cry from what we've seen from Young through the first three years of his career, when he showed occasional flashes but largely struggled.

Season Comp % YPA CPOE Rtg QBR EPA/DB 2023 59.8% 5.5 -0.7 73.7 34.1 -0.21 2024 60.9% 6.3 2.1 82.2 50.7 -0.02 2025 63.6% 6.3 -0.3 87.8 47.6 -0.02 2026 63.0% 8.9 8.0 113.3 81.4 0.27

Because this performance looks like such an outlier compared with the rest of his career, it's worth asking how real it really is. After digging into the film and watching all 80 of Young's dropbacks this season, I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that the numbers reflect how well he's playing. For the most part, he is balling out there.

Has he missed a few throws he should make? He sure has. He's still completing only 63% of his passes despite the hot start (partly because of a high tight-window throw rate -- more on that later), which is below average. And his off-target throw rate, per TruMedia, is 12.1%, which is actually a bit higher than last year (9.2%).

> pic.twitter.com/Fm2ZG0XuVA — jadubin5clips (@jadubin5clips) September 22, 2026

Has he been helped by some fantastic wide receiver play from Tetairoa McMillan and especially Jalen Coker , who have made some incredible catches? He sure has. Those guys are playing at an extraordinarily high level to begin the season. They've been one of the best one-two punches in the league so far. Young has given them opportunities, and they've both made the most of them and hauled in some passes that could have been incomplete passes.

> pic.twitter.com/WSMFGkdza0 — jadubin5clips (@jadubin5clips) September 22, 2026

But Bryce has also thrown some absolute dimes, especially deep downfield -- he currently leads the NFL in deep ball completions (20-plus air yards). There's a reason his completion percentage over expected is so good at plus 8.0%. He's firing bullets into tight windows (his tight-window throw rate of 17.8% is eighth-highest out of 35 qualified quarterbacks at Next Gen Stats) and doing it with a high degree of confidence. This looks like a player who knows he has the arm to get the ball where he wants it to go, and then gets it there.

> pic.twitter.com/hYeFxx1bgR — jadubin5clips (@jadubin5clips) September 22, 2026

He's also showing off his improvisational skills. According to Pro Football Focus, 66.3% of Young's dropbacks have taken at least 2.5 seconds, which means they're outside the quick-game time frame. That's the seventh-highest rate of long dropbacks in the league. Young is 24 of 46 for 438 yards, three touchdowns and an interception on those plays. The pick was a bad decision on a crossing route that got undercut by the defensive back (and it came on a similar type throw to one he had completed earlier in the game). But the other stuff he's shown on these types of plays has been really impressive. His freelancing skill was one of his best traits coming into the draft; this is what it often looked like at Alabama.

> pic.twitter.com/4TeybdEwIG — jadubin5clips (@jadubin5clips) September 22, 2026

Of course, the operative question about Young's performance is less "how good has he been" than "can he keep this up?" It's worth noting that he's played against two defenses that are expected to be among the worst in the NFL. The Bears and Falcons aren't exactly pressure mavens. Chicago is wildly depleted on the back end due to injuries, and Atlanta has probably been the single-most favorable matchup for Young in his entire career to date. He's been far better against the Falcons than he has against the rest of the league.

The Panthers' upcoming schedule, luckily, doesn't look too difficult in the near future -- at least on the surface. Over the next two weeks, Carolina plays against the Browns and Lions  -- two teams with defenses that aren't particularly challenging to play against. If Young's new level of play is for real, he should be able to keep it up in those two matchups.

The Panthers do play the Eagles in their first game following their Week 5 bye, but then they get the Buccaneers (who just allowed Deshaun Watson to go off against them) and the  Packers . Green Bay's defense could look different if Micah Parsons is back by then, but it hasn't been imposing so far. Again, if he's made real strides and this early-season level of play is about more than just the defenses he's faced, Young should be able to perform well in those matchups.

There are some more difficult games remaining in the second half of the season, though, like those against the Broncos , Ravens , Vikings , Steelers and Seahawks . Once he has to take those tests, we'll likely really see whether what we've seen so far is what we should expect going forward, or whether it's more of a mirage.

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_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/panthers-bryce-young-is-off-to-a-hot-start-in-2026-is-it-real-or-a-mirage/)._