Bryce Young is one of the 100 best players in the NFL. The players said so, and their vote is the only one the league treats as gospel. The Carolina Panthers quarterback came in at No. 98 on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2026, his first appearance on the list since Carolina traded away the future to draft him first overall in 2023. Two years ago, people floated him as one of the worst No. 1 picks of the modern era. Now he has a number next to his name on a ballot his peers filled out. That is a real turn.
A real turn is not a finished story. The honest read on No. 98 is that Panthers fans can enjoy it without pretending it settles the Bryce Young question. He earned respectt last season. He did not earn a verdict. The optimism is real. So it is the case that the ranking caught him at his best moment and may flatter a year that ended quieter than it started.
The Top 100 carries weight because players vote on it. The timing of that vote matters more than most fans realize, and it matters a lot for Young.
Players fill out a top-20 ballot. A first-place vote is worth 20 points, second 19, on down the line. No rules govern who you can pick, so players vote for teammates, for friends, for themselves. Participation has grown from a few hundred players to as many as 1,100 since NFL Films started visiting all 32 facilities to collect ballots.
Here is the part that reframes everything. The ballots go out around Thanksgiving, and most come back before the Super Bowl. The reveal you are watching now, two players a day on X from late June into September, plus the player reaction clips NFL Films pairs with it, was all filmed after the season ended. The voting happened months earlier. A defensive lineman who turned his ballot in the week after Thanksgiving was grading Bryce Young on everything through about Week 12. Young’s January playoff game had not happened yet. For that voter, it did not exist.
Sit with that, because it changes how you read No. 98. The Top 100 is not a referee’s final ruling on a full season. It is a snapshot of how a player looked during a window that opened in late November, and for plenty of voters, the window closed before December even started. For most stars, that distinction means nothing. For Bryce Young in 2025, it means a great deal because the ballots went out at the exact moment he was playing the best football of his life.
Give Young his due. The season was a real leap. In 16 regular-season games, he completed 63.6 percent of his throws for 3,011 yards, with 23 touchdowns against 11 interceptions and an 87.8 passer rating. He added 216 rushing yards and two scores. The volume numbers stay modest. He finished 21st in passing yards, tied for 14th in touchdowns, and 22nd in QBR. But this was the most productive football of his career by a wide margin, and it came with wins. Carolina went 8-9, took the NFC South on tiebreakers over an equally messy Tampa Bay and Atlanta, and reached the playoffs for the first time since 2017. The division title was the franchise’s first since 2015.
For a quarterback who threw nine touchdowns as a rookie and lost his job to Andy Dalton two games into 2024, climbing to a division title and a peer vote is a remarkable two-year arc. The skeptic denies none of that. The skeptic just reads the month-by-month ledger because the production did not pile up evenly.
Young opened cold. He posted a 77.1 rating in September while the team stumbled to a 1-3 start, including a 0-2 hole where he turned the ball over five times in the first five quarters. He steadied in October, six touchdowns to two picks at a 97.7 rating. Then he erupted in November: 1,049 yards, seven touchdowns, a 93.5 rating, headlined by a 448-yard, three-touchdown afternoon in a 30-27 overtime win over the Falcons that broke Cam Newton’s franchise record for passing yards in a game.
Look at the calendar. That November stretch is exactly what the voters were watching as their ballots hit their lockers. Young’s best football and the league’s evaluation window arrived together. It is hard to picture a more favorable accident of timing for a borderline candidate trying to sneak onto the back of a top-100 list.
Here is what No. 98 skips. Once the calendar turned past Thanksgiving, once most of those ballots were already filled out, Young cooled off. In December, he threw for 408 yards across the entire month, three touchdowns, and an 82.7 rating. That is a clear drop in both volume and efficiency from his November peak. His January regular-season work was clean but light: 266 yards, 68.6 percent, a 98.0 rating on a few attempts. That is the line of a quarterback managing games, not carrying them.
Some of that decline reflects well on Carolina, not poorly on Young. As the defense rounded into a respectable unit, the offense leaned harder on the run and asked less of its passer in winnable games. A smaller workload does not mean a smaller player. But the shape of the season is plain. Young peaked in November, faded in December, and the league built its picture of him from the brighter exposure. A voter filling out a ballot the first week of December was grading the guy who just threw for 448, not the guy who would scuffle through the final month.
The slow-start problem makes it worse, because it showed up no matter the month. Split his full season by game halves and you get two quarterbacks. The first-half passer completed 61.5 percent for 1,311 yards, eight touchdowns, seven interceptions, a 76.4 rating. The second-half passer hit 65.3 percent for 1,646 yards, 15 touchdowns, four picks, a 97.1 rating. The man can play winning football. He keeps spotting opponents a quarter or two before he gets going, and that habit traveled with him into the postseason.
Carolina’s season ended in a 34-31 wild-card loss to the Rams, who went on to win it all behind league MVP Matthew Stafford. Young’s line tells the whole skeptic’s story in one game: 21 of 40 for 264 yards, a touchdown, an interception, plus a rushing score. He started slow, threw a first-quarter interception that became Rams points, and managed just 11 of 20 for 151 yards in the first half. He finished strong, leading a late drive that ended in a touchdown to Jalen Coker and a 31-27 lead inside the final three minutes. Then it slipped away. A Josh Sweat strip-sack and a Zaven Collins recovery were the dagger, not all on Young, but the kind of finish a top-100 quarterback is supposed to nail.
Remember the timing. For every voter who sent a ballot back in early December, this game never happened. They graded Young without his best evidence of postseason mettle and without the slow start that bookended it. The reaction clip of Young finding out he made the list, filmed this offseason, shows him responding to a ranking built partly on a game some of his own voters never got to weigh. That is the strange machinery behind a number that looks so tidy.
No conversation about Young’s standing can dodge the price Carolina paid, because that price warps every read on him. To move up for the No. 1 pick in 2023, the Panthers sent Chicago wide receiver D.J. Moore, the 2023 No. 9 and No. 61 picks, a 2025 second-rounder, and their 2024 first-round pick. Young’s 2-15 rookie collapse turned that 2024 first into the No. 1 overall selection, which the Bears used on Caleb Williams.
So Young is not just measured against his draft slot. He is measured against a parallel universe where Carolina keeps its picks and its best receiver, and against the quarterback Chicago landed with Carolina’s own pick. That is a brutal yardstick, and it explains why a respectable bounce-back still draws shrugs nationally. No. 98 is a fine outcome for a late-first-round flier. For the most expensive quarterback trade in recent memory, it reads less like vindication and more like a down payment. The trade is why “Bryce Young made the Top 100” lands as relief instead of triumph, and it is why his 2026 bar sits a full tier above the ranking.
Here, the skeptic and the believer can finally shake hands. The conditions around Young in 2026 are better than at any point in his career, which means we are about to get the cleanest read yet on who he is.
Start with the defense, because it changed Carolina’s math. After finishing dead last in both yards and points allowed in 2024, the unit climbed to 16th in yards and 15th in points last season on the back of an aggressive offseason. A quarterback who no longer has to win 31-30 shootouts can play within himself, and given Young’s slow starts, that fits him. The defense’s jump is also what let December go run-heavy in the first place. A healthier version of that balance shields Young from having to be a hero before he warms up.
The supporting cast is the other reason to buy. Carolina locked up Jalen Coker on a three-year, $35 million extension worth up to $41 million, keeping him through 2029. Coker finished second on the team with 394 yards despite missing the start of the season, and he caught the near-game-winner in the playoff loss. More important, Tetairoa McMillan is healthy. The No. 8 overall pick in 2025 won Offensive Rookie of the Year with 70 catches for 1,014 yards and seven touchdowns while fighting through a calf injury, a late-season foot-and-ankle problem, and an illness in Week 17. A fully healed McMillan next to Coker gives Young the best receiver tandem he has ever had, and both were trending up as the season closed. If the late-year offensive dip owed something to banged-up pass catchers, that problem fixes itself.
Add one schematic change. Brad Idzik takes over play-calling from Dave Canales in 2026. Carolina now has a roster and a structure built to put Young in better early-down spots and to attack faster out of the gate. The pieces that explain his second-half surges are in place to show up in the first quarters.
No. 98 is the right number, and not as a slight. It fits a quarterback who was good in stretches, won a division, nearly upset the eventual champions, and still carries a season-long consistency problem and a draft-day price tag no one will grade on a curve. The peer vote got the placement right, and the timing was lucky. Young’s ranking rests largely on a November that crested just as ballots dropped, and it never accounts for the December fade or the playoff game half his voters never saw.
That is no reason to dismiss the ranking. It is a reason to treat it as a floor, not a finish line. Young has done the hard part. Nobody argues he belongs in the league anymore. What he has not done is cement himself, and the gap between “made the list at 98” and “nobody questions the list” is the whole job of his 2026 season. With a real defense behind him, a healed McMillan and a paid Coker in front of him, and a new voice calling plays, he finally has the conditions to close it. The challenge for Bryce Young was never whether he could crack the Top 100. He just did. It is whether next year, the ballots filed in December look as good as the ones filed in November.
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