Panthers get humiliated in season opener. And I’m not sure Bryce Young will ever work out.

On Bryce Young’s very first pass of the 2024 season, he threw an interception.

In the second half, Young improved.

It took him until his second pass to throw an interception.

After a full offseason, with a vibrant young play caller installed as his head coach and several additional offensive weapons to work with, Young looked exactly the same in the beginning of his second season as he did at the end of his first.

Overwhelmed. Undersized. Out of his element.

Yes, the Panthers’ embarrassing 47-10 loss to New Orleans in Week 1 of the 2024 NFL season was only one game. And the Carolina defense was surprisingly just as bad and possibly even worse than Young, as it allowed an astonishing nine scoring drives on the Saints’ first nine possessions.

But at the forefront of all this pain inflicted on another black-and-blue Sunday for Carolina was Young, the former Heisman Trophy winner at Alabama who plays the game’s most important position. And although I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, I just don’t know if it’s ever going to work out for him in Charlotte.

The Panthers will give it every chance, of course, because they’ve invested the No. 1 selection of the 2023 NFL Draft and so much else in Young. They have earmarked him as the guy from the very first game of his NFL career, making him the starter and a team captain and entrusting much of their future to him. And he’s only 23. There’s that. And he looked good in training camp and in his one drive of the preseason. There’s that, too.

But wishing Young was the guy and him actually turning into the guy are two very different things.

I’d love to be proven wrong, because it’s not a lot of fun to cover a losing team every single year. But all we saw Sunday was the Panthers threatening numerous team records for futility with this 37-point opening-day loss, which not only took the bloom off the rose, but also took the rose itself and threw it into a wood chipper.

The quarterback numbers: Young was 13 for 30 for 161 yards, with no touchdown passes and two interceptions. He was sacked four times. His QB rating was 32.8.

Somehow, it looked even worse.

The entire game was comical. It was infuriating. It was both believable and unbelievable — believable that the Panthers would lose again, because they went an NFL-worst 2-15 a year ago and haven’t made the playoffs since 2017. This was the 100th game of David Tepper’s tenure as the owner of the Panthers, and the team is 32-68 and has never had a winning record since the billionaire bought it.

But it was also unbelievable that the Panthers would be down 30-0 in the second quarter to a Saints team that is, most likely, mediocre.

‘We got our a-- kicked’

Said Robert Hunt, the Panthers’ new offensive guard who is supposed to be part of the offensive retooling: “I just think we got our ass kicked today, you know what I mean? Truth be told, we just got whooped in every phase.”

I’ve covered the Panthers for three decades, and I’m not sure the Panthers have played a worse half of football in their 30 seasons than in the first half of this one.

They have played more significant bad halves of football, certainly, such as in the 2008 postseason when they had a home playoff game against Arizona and found themselves down at halftime, 27-7. That was a far more important game, and one in which quarterback Jake Delhomme turned the ball over six times. But even in that one, the Panthers briefly led, 7-0.

In the first quarter alone, the Panthers gave up a 59-yard touchdown pass on a coverage bust that had cornerback Jaycee Horn yelling at safety Jordan Fuller, and offensive tackle Taylor Moton accidentally tackled Young himself when he knocked the scrambling quarterback to the ground.

But none of it was as awful as Young’s first throw. Trying to hit a well-covered Diontae Johnson about 20 yards down the field, he instead overthrew the ball into the hands of the New Orleans safety.

A shaky debut for Canales, too

Let’s pause for a minute and consider what new head coach Dave Canales did there, too. What was he doing calling a somewhat dangerous pass play in the middle of the field on his very first play call for the Panthers, when he had talked for the past six months about running the ball early and often?

The Panthers were already down 7-0 by then and the Saints’ legendary home crowd was in full throat. It was time to give it to Chuba Hubbard a couple of times and calm things down.

Still, it was Young who threw that interception in the direction of Johnson — Canales said, “I thought he had good space,” when asked if Johnson was actually open.

And it was Young who owned it afterward.

“Any time that the ball is in peril, and obviously it’s a turnover, that’s on me,” Young said. The quarterback took full responsibility for both his interceptions, which is what Young always does, because he’s a very nice young man and I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about his conduct off the field.

But on the field?

Man, he just doesn’t make enough plays.

Young hesitated when guys were open Sunday or threw it to them when they weren’t. He got aggressive when he should have been careful and got careful when he should have been aggressive. Even his one touchdown — his first NFL rushing touchdown in his career — almost got negated, as Young crossed the goal line and fumbled almost simultaneously on a fourth-down scramble. Fortunately, Young broke the plane just before getting the ball knocked out.

By then, though, the Panthers were trailing 37-3. Canales would eventually substitute backup quarterback Andy Dalton into the game deep in the fourth quarter, to make sure Young didn’t get hurt. That’s how the game ended up, with Dalton handing it off and just trying to get the nightmare over with, rather than with Young trying to lead a two-minute drive for a game-winning touchdown.

“It doesn’t define us,” Young said of the 47-10 loss. “It’s a long year.”

Canales had a similar sentiment.

I asked the head coach afterward what he would tell Carolina fans who had gotten excited about the offseason only to witness this.

“It’s a long journey,” Canales said. “It’s a long journey to become us. I truly believe that. I knew that whether we started 4-0 or 0-4, whatever that is, what I knew is this is going to take a long time to become us.”

Yes, another long year in Pantherland.

That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.