I took a week off to cover the biggest moves of the first week of free agency, but now I am back to diving deep into the already-forgotten fantasy football narratives of the 2023 season. The Panthers’ 2023 season was terrible; there’s no way around it. But is there reason for hope? Let’s get right into it.
Ground Rules: Check out the first edition here for a full explanation of what’s going on. All scoring is Half-PPR, Week 18 stats are not included (so a full season is 16 games), and only players currently being drafted in the top 200 of Underdog Best Ball drafts are covered.
Quarterback
Bryce Young
The Box Scores
- Total Points: 162.2; QB23
- Games Played: 15
- Points Per Game: 10.8; QB38
Beyond The Box Scores
- Full Games Played: 15
- Points Per Full Game: 10.8; QB38
From a fantasy perspective, there is almost nothing good you can say about Bryce Young’s debut season. At a position where 15 points is the bare minimum for a decent performance, the 2023 first-overall pick had twice as many games below 10 points (11, counting Week 18) as he did above (five). There’s no evidence of Young growing into the NFL either, as he averaged significantly fewer points in Weeks 10-18 (8.5) than he did in Weeks 1-9 (12.8). To be fair, you can definitely make a compelling case that this wasn’t all Young’s fault: According to PFF, the Panthers were the league’s sixth-worst team in pass-blocking and third-worst team in receiving. According to ESPN’s receiver tracking metrics, Adam Thielen was the team’s best receiver in terms of separation, ranking tied with seven other players for 37th in the league; the next best Panther in that metric was veteran tight end Hayden Hurst, who ranked 112th out of 153 qualified pass-catchers. This was about as bad of an environment as you can possibly provide for an undersized, not particularly mobile rookie who relied on timing and precision in college. With that said, Young still ranked solidly below average in just about every metric you can think of: Among 41 qualified QBs, he was worst in YPA, 14th-worst in completion percentage over expected, fourth-worst in pressure-to-sack rate, fifth-worst in adjusted completion percentage … you get the picture.
Takeaway
Heading into 2024, the most positive thing you can say about Young as a fantasy asset is that he is unlikely to lose his job. That’s not a given for other players around his current QB29 ADP. Even still, he isn’t worth drafting except in leagues where you truly need a locked-in starter (deep 2-QB leagues or potentially Best Ball). The addition of Diontae Johnson should help some, and we can always project some improvement from second-year players, but Young was so far away from being a positive fantasy asset as a rookie that I’ll let someone else chase his pedigree and hope for a breakout.
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Running Back
Chuba Hubbard
The Box Scores
- Total Points: 152.8; RB28
- Games Played: 16
- Points Per Game: 9.6; RB34
Beyond The Box Scores
- Games Played As Starter: 11
- Points Per Game Started: 11.4; RB25
It took him a while to get going, as he only officially became the Panthers’ starter in Week 6 and was playing less than 50% of snaps as late as Week 11, but Hubbard quietly finished the season as the lone bright spot on the Panthers’ offense. After Frank Reich was fired, Hubbard averaged a very respectable 12.5 Half-PPR points over the last six games of the season. He was also impressively efficient for playing on such a bad offense, ranking fourth among qualified RBs in success rate per Next Gen Stats, as well as 15th in PFF Rushing Grade. His 9% target share wasn’t particularly impressive, but he did rank seventh in the NFL in terms of his snap rate on long downs and distances. In addition to playing the majority of passing downs, Hubbard also ranked sixth among all RBs with a 70% snap rate on short downs and distances. Hubbard’s snap count rankings are both inflated slightly by the simple fact that he played every game, a rare feat for an NFL running back, but they are still impressive. The only other backs to rank as Hubbard in both short and long-distance snaps were Christian McCaffrey and Rachaad White.
Takeaway
If, and this is a big if, the Panthers’ offense improves in 2024, Hubbard could be surprisingly solid. His role, especially by the end of the season, was very good, both in usage type and usage quantity, as he averaged 22 opportunities following Reich’s firing. Of course, that interim regime is now gone, but we did see new Panthers Head Coach Dave Canales force-feed a similar running back in Rachaad White in Tampa Bay last year. There is still a chance the Panthers add to their running back room, but a team with so many needs and no first-round pick doesn’t feel like a team that can afford to spend a pick on a running back. At his current RB34 ADP, I love taking a chance on Hubbard, who, at the very least, seems well set up to volume his way to flex numbers. If Canales can take the Panthers’ offense from terrible to just below average, Hubbard could easily be a solid RB2.
Miles Sanders
The Box Scores
- Total Points: 72.3; RB54
- Games Played: 15
- Points Per Game: 4.8; RB61
Beyond The Box Scores
- Full Games Played: 14
- Points Per Full Game: 5.2; RB59
Once again, I find myself regretting setting my ADP threshold at 200 (Sanders’ current ADP is 190), because, to be honest, I don’t want to talk about Miles Sanders. Among 50 running backs with at least 100 carries in 2023, he was the third-worst in terms of yards created (according to SumerSports), fifth-lowest in terms of rush yards vs. expected per attempt and dead last in success rate (according to Next Gen Stats), and had the second-lowest PFF Rush Grade (according to PFF, duh). And his inefficiency wasn’t limited to the ground game, as he had the eighth-lowest yards per route run of qualified RBs. Luckily, the Panthers eventually realized this, decreasing Sanders’ role more and more as the season went on. Sanders averaged just a 27% snap share over the final seven weeks of the season, to go with a truly useless 3.2 fantasy points per game.
Takeaway
I’m staying far away from Sanders in 2024. Yes, he is second on the Panthers’ depth chart right now, meaning he theoretically has at least handcuff value. But given his inefficiency last season, I don’t think he would hold onto the lead job for long, even if an injury handed it to him. Even in the last rounds of drafts, there are other backs with more upside and/or on better offenses that you should throw a dart at instead of hoping for a bounceback from Sanders.
Wide Receiver
Adam Thielen
The Box Scores
- Total Points: 177.3; WR19
- Games Played: 16
- Points Per Game: 11.1; WR26
Beyond The Box Scores
- Full Games Played: 16
- Points Per Full Game: 11.1; WR26
Looking at my in-season coverage of Thielen, it pains me to see how late into the season I was still chasing his hot start. In case you somehow missed it, 2023 was a tale of two seasons for the 33-year-old. Through the Panthers’ Week 7 bye, Thielen was the WR5 overall with a whopping 17 Half-PPR points per game. But not only did he not maintain that 17-point average for the rest of the season, he didn’t even score that many points once. In fact, his high-water mark in Weeks 8-18 was a measly 12.4, and he averaged a full 10 points fewer per game with 7.0. And it’s not like he wasn’t getting opportunities: The veteran slot WR still averaged a very respectable 25% target share from Week 8 onward, only 3% down from his pre-bye average. We can find a bit of an explanation in the fact that the Panthers’ total passing volume also decreased significantly, from 40.2 attempts per game before the bye to just 31.4 after. And it’s also very notable that Thielen scored four touchdowns in those first six games and zero in the remaining 10. But even all those things together don’t explain his absurd 10-point-per-game regression.
When another former Vikings WR had a huge, seemingly inexplicable in-season decline, I checked with PFF to see if his subjective performance had gotten worse (spoiler alert, it had). But that’s not really the case with Thielen. He didn’t maintain the elite 81.6 PFF Receiving Grade he posted over the first six weeks, but his 78.8 grade starting in Week 8 was still good for 24th in the league. At the end of the day, it looks as though Thielen just happened to get lucky over the first six weeks of the season (17 PPG on 14.7 expected PPG) and unlucky over the last 10 weeks (7 PPG on 9.8 expected), making what was already a solid drop in volume seem even more dramatic.
Takeaway
If it weren’t for the Panthers recently trading for Diontae Johnson (whom I won’t discuss in-depth here, but will cover in the Steelers’ edition of this column), I might actually be taking all this as a reason to be in on Thielen for 2024. After all, even just looking at his much worse post-bye splits, his 9.8 expected points per game would have made him the WR39, easily clear of his current WR71 ADP. But Johnson is simply a better player than Thielen at this point in both of their careers, and, even though I do think the arrival of Canales should be an upgrade for this offense, I don’t trust Young and Carolina to support more than one reliable fantasy receiver. Thielen is probably still a value in Best Ball drafts, but he doesn’t bring enough upside to be a particularly intriguing late receiver pick in Redraft leagues.
Tight End
Thank the fantasy gods. Hayden Hurst’s current ADP is 239, so I don’t have to give him a full write-up. He has signed with the Chargers, which is a decent landing spot, but I don’t think he will find fantasy relevance while competing with Donald Parham and Will Dissly for snaps.
