4 pros and cons to the Carolina Panthers young defense in 2021

Development vs. Unknown Quantities

The biggest plus for young players coming into the NFL and also the largest excuse for early poor performance is development. That word is thrown around a lot but what does it really mean?

In a nutshell, it is how their game evolves from the time they start playing a sport until they reach their peak or lack thereof. Development can either be positive or negative, but every player develops in one way or another.

The other thing to remember is that both kinds of development take lots of time. An opportunity that tends to show rather large growing pains.

So don’t expect a young Carolina Panthers defense, even if it’s very good, to be elite 100 percent of the time.

Rookies will make mistakes.

You only need to look to a player like Kelvin Benjamin to see the wrong direction of development at the next level after a promising start. However, for every one of them, there is also a Brian Burns who looks poised to continue climbing to his peak for the foreseeable future.

Players along with him on that journey are standouts like Jeremy Chinn, Yetur Gross-Matos, and Derrick Brown. All members of a Panthers team that looks to take a collective step forward in 2021 and all signs point toward that being the case.

Even without the flashy stats of Chinn or Burns, Gross-Matos and especially Brown quietly had amazing rookie campaigns at their respective positions and only improved as time went on in 2020. With another year behind Matt Rhule and veteran leadership added in the offseason, they should only be more comfortable in the professional atmosphere and that should scare people.

With all that good being said, however, there is also a largely unknown quantity to young players when it comes to development. Enter the Benjamin example.

So when talking about a player like the Carolina Panthers’ first-round pick Jaycee Horn and their seemingly sky-high potential, we need to remember that the player has never taken an NFL snap and neither has Terrace Marshall Jr. or even Trevor Lawrence.

Only time will tell whether or not they have what it takes to bring their game to the next level. But early indications and intangibles are promising.

Again, we need to remember how much of an unknown these players are and even the best can struggle in a bad scheme or team fit, we see this time and time again when someone leaves a team and becomes a star.

It takes a minimum of three years to truly know what you have and a lot of the time it’s even longer than that.

So while the potential is high, that’s all it is at the moment, potential, and we can only hope that those unknown quantities turn into positives and not negatives. Because if they lean toward the negative side, the Panthers could be set back a good long while.