The B-Gap: PJ Walker doesn’t bring certainty to Carolina, but he brings hope

By Sam Robb O’Hagan

On Sunday, following the Carolina Panthers’ surreal divisional defeat against the Atlanta Falcons, Patrick Mahomes went to Twitter to claim PJ Walker’s game-tying 62-yard touchdown pass to DJ Moore with 23 seconds left in regulation as the “best throw of the year and not even close.” 

From a Pro Bowl, All-Pro and Super Bowl-winning quarterback who has made plenty of ludicrously impressive throws himself this season, that is high praise.

And high praise was warranted. The throw, which traveled 67.2 air yards to become the longest completion by air distance that Next Gen Stats has ever recorded, was placed perfectly in Moore’s bread-basket, despite blanketing coverage from two Falcons defenders.

And this was not a “Hail Mary” — as the NFL’s Twitter account labeled it — this was the play to set up the Hail Mary. When the ball is snapped, there are 23 seconds on the clock, enough for at least another play. In his postgame press conference, interim Head Coach Steve Wilks called the play a “scissors concept,”  meaning the boundary receiver (Moore) runs a “post” route while the inside receiver runs a “corner” route ; not the typical “Hail Mary” play call that sends five receivers streaking mindlessly towards the goal line. Walker doesn’t need to launch this ball to the end-zone,  but in the face of clear double-coverage, while off-balance and outside of the pocket ,  he lets it fly anyway. 

Mahomes certainly has an argument.

It is “only” one throw, but a generational one at that, and a feat that very few players in the league are athletically capable of accomplishing. That won’t come as a surprise to those who have long followed Walker, whose career has been a series of promising peaks that failed to plateau. Most famous was his transcendent performance as the MVP of the short-lived XFL in early 2020, which earned him an NFL contract in Carolina that has yet to materialize into a starting role despite intermittent opportunities in each of the last three seasons.

It’s remarkable, given Walker’s undeniable athletic ability, that he entered the season fourth on the Panthers’ depth chart under center. Eight weeks later, he is clearly the best quarterback on the team and has accordingly been named the starter by Wilks , who was thrusted into his role as interim head coach following the chaotic departure of Matt Rhule before Week 6. 

The dysfunction throughout the organization in the first half of the season has certainly worked to Walker’s benefit, but he has unequivocally earned the job. The Panthers — at least for the immediate future — are PJ Walker’s team, as they should be.

This is a team starved of certainty under center like few others. Each of the last three seasons has begun with a different starting quarterback than the season prior, and in total, the Panthers have acquired seven different signal-callers over that period:  three through free agency, three through trade and one through the draft. They have taken the “revolving door” cliché to an extreme that only the imprudent Colts have come close to matching.

It is this instability under center that has made the post-Cam Newton era in Carolina so directionless. It’s become a killer cycle of ill-advised spending ,  pick after pick being thrown at quarterbacks whose price tag can only be justified by overly wishful thinking.

In 2021, it was Sam Darnold, for whom it had become clear had fallen out of favor in New York and would inevitably be replaced by the Jets’ imminent top three draft pick. Carolina, desperate for a solution to the failed Teddy Bridgewater experiment of a year earlier, forked over second, fourth and sixth-round picks for Darnold, who led the team to a 5–12 record. 

When Darnold floundered, it was Baker Mayfield, who had already been replaced in Cleveland and cost the Panthers a conditional fifth round pick — not flattering compensation to surrender, but certainly bewildering given the trade came just weeks after they used a third-round pick to draft Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corall. Six weeks into the season, both Darnold and Corall were on injured reserve and Mayfield had been benched. There were other problems, of course, but none of them seemed to matter . The quarterbacks were all that bad.

So here Walker stands, once again looking notably more competent than the more desired passers brought in to stop the QB carousel in Charlotte, and once again providing a glimmer of light to a dark season. With every impressive performance, more questions are asked of Rhule’s regime, who witnessed similarly strong relief appearances from Walker in both 2020 and 2021, but clearly never believed in him as the franchise’s long term answer. There is perhaps no bigger feather in Walker’s cap at this point ; despite the endless attempts at replacing him, he ended up outlasting Rhule in Carolina.

In their last two games, each against divisional opponents and each started by Walker, the Panther offense has experienced an unthinkable resurgence. They have broken their highest single-game yardage total of the season twice, including a 478 yard showing against Atlanta ,  and scored more than half of the points they scored in their first six games. That remarkable improvement has come despite the absence of wide receiver Robbie Anderson and superstar running back Christian McCaffrey, who were both traded before Week 7. 

The Panthers fired their head coach, traded two of their most productive offensive play-makers, changed quarterbacks and statistically it made their offense almost twice as good. To put it simply — that is not supposed to happen. But it has, and the common denominator in all of it has been Walker’s play.

On the stat sheet, Walker has been only moderately impressive: his 614 passing yards and three touchdowns in three starts are not particularly outstanding, nor is his 62.5% completion percentage. A 93.4 passer rating that would be good enough for 10th in the league had he played enough games to qualify is obviously impressive, but beyond that, Walker isn’t lighting up the surface-level numbers. That can be attributed to the expedited role of Carolina’s running game, which has rushed for 340 yards on 64 rushes in the last two weeks and has limited Walker’s volume as a passer.

His advanced numbers are markedly better. According to PlayerProfiler, he’s completed 41.7% of his “deep balls” — passes on throws that traveled 20+ yards in the air — and has a deep accuracy rating of 6.9, both of which are well above average.

His air yards per attempt is at 8.6, which is above average, but he still maintains an average catchable pass rate at 76.3% and a deep ball catchable pass rate of 66.7%. Despite limited opportunities as the Panthers run rampant on the ground, Walker is establishing himself as a consistent and dangerous deep ball passer.

That is a big deal, and a trend that immediately passes the eye test. Walker has rare arm talent — famously on display during his late-game heroics in Atlanta, but consistently shining throughout the game. On a third down midway through the second quarter, Walker drops a ball between the outstretched arms of the boundary corner and a closing field-side safety for a 27-yard first-down conversion to Terrace Marshall Jr. For most, touch and velocity are mutually exclusive, but not for Walker. And for most, a deep route to the field-side with a bailing corner and a closing safety would be unthrowable. Not for Walker.

On 2nd and long four plays later, he rifles a ball into the tightest of windows behind a sitting linebacker for a 19-yard conversion to Moore. Walker, who generates stunning velocity from a short and efficient release, wills a completion out of a doomed look through his unrelenting raw ability. 

And just look at the way the ball leaves Walker’s hands. Look at it — the preposterous velocity that is generated from such a small, compact frame — it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look real. Yet it comes effortlessly to Walker, whose performance in the Panthers’ most important game of the season was ripe with throws so extraordinary that opposing defenders consistently looked surprised they were even attempted.

Walker’s arm is also flexible. That is a quality only recently considered in the NFL, suddenly made popular, ironically, by Walker’s newest fan in Kansas City.

Highlights of ludicrous Patrick Mahomes’ arm angles have become religion in the NFL, mostly because the league has never seen a quarterback make it a significant part of their game before, but partly because it’s a quality that is evidently effective. It looks cool, but it makes Mahomes better. It makes Walker better too.

The flexibility of Walker’s arm was directly apparent late in the third quarter on Sunday, on the first of three come-from-behind Carolina touchdown drives in the second half. Pressure from the right forces him to slide to the left side of the pocket, leaving him little time or room to reset his body towards an open Moore moving in the opposite direction toward the middle of the field.

Walker doesn’t set his feet or turn his hips, and still corks a side-armed strike to Moore perfectly in stride. This is a really hard throw, and one the Falcons’ defense will feel they did enough to prevent. Instead, it ends up a 29-yard gain on 3rd and 5, which eventually becomes a game-tying touchdown drive. Without the creative capabilities of Walker’s arm, the Panthers are punting the ball back to the Falcons down by eight to start the fourth quarter.

Walker’s rare arm is important, not least because it frustrates defenses. It makes things happen that wouldn’t normally, it makes chicken soup from chicken feathers. Most significantly, it gives the offense a lifeline and a safety net that it can always fall back on.

This is what makes a player like Mahomes so special, and so unplayable for opposing teams. The Chiefs offense isn’t perfect ; defenses have figured it out before and will continue to do so . Same with Josh Allen’s Bills and certainly with Lamar Jackson’s Ravens. Only plenty of the time, it doesn’t actually matter. Mahomes, Allen and Jackson are all athletically gifted enough to turn anything into a positive play.

Like the Chiefs, the Panthers know that a play is never dead with the ball in Walker’s hands ,  that his flexible arm can turn a sack on third down into a first down conversion, or his arm strength can turn a prayer in their own territory with 24 seconds left into a 62-yard touchdown. As Mahomes, Allen and Jackson continue to dominate the league, Walker possesses the X-Factor that makes all three so good.

The problem with the Panthers’ quarterbacks since Cam Newton was released in 2020, particularly with Mayfield, has not been incompetence. Mayfield was fine ;  he’s been a productive player in the NFL before ,  but he was hopelessly limited when things around him faltered.

Carolina’s offensive machine isn’t seamless, which is what Mayfield (and Darnold, Kyle Allen and Teddy Bridgewater before him) needed. The Panther offense was never inept . There were and still are plenty of good players on the depth chart ,  but it was never good enough to make up for its quarterbacks’ defining inability to survive when things didn’t go according to plan.

With Walker, everything is different. He may not have the floor yet — the down-to-down reliability to make the layups and hit the singles like Mayfield had — as it’s important to remember that he’s still only played 13 games in three NFL seasons.

That number will continue to be alarming, even if it can be mostly chalked up to the incompetence of Rhule’s regime. What Walker does have is a clearly elite ceiling which creates invaluable room for error elsewhere. For a rebuilding team that will almost certainly be welcoming a fresh coaching staff next season, Walker’s talent will be critical  should he earn another contract beyond this year.

The book is still out on Walker, who still has a ways to go now just as he did when he made his first cameo in relief of a disappointing Panthers’ starter in 2020. The only difference in 2022? Walker will finally be afforded the time to strive for his ever-apparent ceiling.