Reich’s goal for Panthers: ‘Score some points’

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — One of Bryce Young‘s goals for Friday night’s preseason game against the New York Giants at MetLife Stadium is to help the Carolina Panthers put points on the scoreboard.

That’s something the top pick of the draft didn’t come close to doing in his NFL preseason debut against the New York Jets, a 27-0 loss at Bank of America Stadium on Saturday.

No other NFL team was held scoreless in Week 1 of the preseason.

“We’re competitors at the end of the day,” the rookie quarterback said Wednesday. “There’s no excuses for what’s going on [with the vanilla game plan]. For us, between the lines, we want to compete. We want to win. Things aren’t always going to go as planned, but 100 percent every time we go out there we want to score, we want to be successful.”

Young was 4-for-6 for 21 yards against the Jets. He led Carolina to only one first down in three series, didn’t get the offense past midfield and was 0-for-2 on third down.

“Just didn’t execute on those,” Young said of the third-down throws. “That’s on me. That’s my fault. It’s on me to get the ball to the right guys in the right spots.”

Coach Frank Reich liked a lot of what he saw from the former Alabama star in terms of managing the offense and making good decisions with less than stellar play from the line. He expects Young to take about the same number of snaps (11) that he did against the Jets.

But more production is one of his goals, as well.

“Obviously, we want to have some success out there, move the ball, make first downs and score some points,” Reich said. “Just play more consistently as an offensive unit.

“This isn’t just Bryce, but be better on third down, get our run game going a little bit. Just overall, on offense, we need to have a better outing.”

Reich admitted that won’t be easy against a Giants defense run by Wink Martindale, particularly in the preseason when Young and the staff won’t spend a lot of time game-planning for the blitz packages they expect to see.

“It’s going to be a really good challenge for our offense against their defense, just because Wink is very exotic with his pressure package,” Reich said. “There’s going to be a blitz zero, there’s going to be all kinds of pressure.”

Carolina also will be rotating a lot of players in and out of the offensive line, particularly right guard where rookie Chandler Zavala will play for the first time along with Nash Jensen, Michael Jordan and Deonte Brown.

“That gets me excited,” Reich said. “We get to see how these guys react. … Can they see [the pressure]? Can they function?”

Reich also will get to see how Young responds to the pressure that so far he’s handled well.

“If they’re going to bring all pressures, which they probably will, they may get us on one or two, but somewhere along the line we need to make some big plays,” he said. “We’ll see who can make those plays.”