Matt Corral is the Carolina Panthers’ forgotten quarterback. He is a 24-year-old enigma who in the past year, if we’re talking strictly football, lost just about everything: His health, his teammates in the QB room, his first NFL head coach and even his uniform number.
“It was a rough year,” Corral said Monday. “A long one.”
Now Corral is buried on the Panthers’ depth chart at No. 3, behind veteran Andy Dalton and rookie No. 1 pick Bryce Young. Corral was considered the Carolina Panthers’ quarterback of the future only a year ago, with Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield serving as bridge QBs until he was ready.
That has all changed.
Darnold and Mayfield are gone. Young has arrived, and he cost a king’s ransom in draft and player capital. Dalton is a trusted veteran who has started 162 NFL games and will hold down the fort until Young is ready.
And Corral? He suffered a serious Lisfranc foot injury in a preseason game in August 2022 that wrecked his entire rookie season. Last year became essentially Corral’s redshirt season. In the meantime, Matt Rhule — the coach who said on draft night in 2022 he was “incredibly fired up” to get Corral — got fired himself. Frank Reich was hired, looked at the current QB situation and along with the rest of the Panthers’ brass decided to trade up and invest heavily in Young.
So now Corral is starting over. He has handed over his No. 9 uniform to Young, who wore that number at Alabama. Now wearing No. 2, Corral is getting questions about whether he wants to get shipped somewhere else.
“Personally, if it was up to me, I don’t want to get traded,” Corral said. “I love the people here. I love the people that I’m around. I want to play for Coach Reich.”
Corral handled himself well in a news conference Monday, although one thing he said was curious. On draft night, right around the time the Panthers drafted Young at No. 1 amid all the hoopla that a No. 1 pick gets, Corral posted this cryptic message on Instagram.
The post read:
Then the father said:
I wanted to let you know that you are not worth anything if you are not in the right place. If you are not appreciated, do not be angry. That means you are in the wrong place. Don’t stay in a place where no one sees your value.
This is not a Bible verse, by the way. And Corral claimed on Monday the “no one sees your value” post had “zero” to do with football or with the Panthers taking Young on the very same night as when he gave the quote life on social media.
Said Corral: “I’m just gonna say that the post on draft night had nothing to do with football… Like I said, it was just personal stuff, just my social life and my relationships with people that care about me and I care about them. Had nothing to do with football.”
Oookay. So maybe that’s true, but if so, why did Corral delete the post?
It seemed awfully on the nose for that particular night’s news — the Panthers had just drafted someone to play Corral’s position, after all.
In any case, for that and other reasons, Reich and Corral had a talk.
Said Reich: “I had a great conversation with Matt the other day…. My only two cents that I would say would be, ‘You’ve got to play the long game. It’s a long season and it’s a long career. Just do the next right thing. Work hard… Be a good teammate… Be ready when your opportunity comes and make the most of it.”
We’ve all seen numerous cases where an NFL team gets down to their third-string quarterback at some point in the season. Corral is going to stick on this team as long as Carolina doesn’t trade him, because as a third-round 2022 pick Carolina has some capital invested in him, too. The Panthers cut fourth-string quarterback Jacob Eason last week in part to make sure Corral gets enough reps in practice.
“We just want to find out what we have,” Reich said. “Obviously, we as an organization thought pretty highly of him in the draft to draft him where we drafted him last year. Then he got hurt and so he didn’t get very many reps. And there’s no replacing that. So this is really about trying to give him every opportunity.”
Corral is anxious to get those chances. After the long rehab for his Lisfranc injury, he said the first time he could put on cleats and run around on a field that he “felt like I was a little kid back in Pee Wees again. It was just surreal. It was a grateful moment for sure.”
Reich said Corral should play a good bit in August in the preseason, as he was also slated to do a year ago until he got hurt when he got stepped on awkwardly in the fourth quarter of an exhibition game against New England.
With the Panthers knowing what Dalton can do and likely being very careful with Young, Corral may throw more passes in the preseason than those two put together. He’s determined not to stay forgotten for long.
