Carolina quarterback Bryce Young is on course to play for the first time this preseason when the Panthers meet the Buffalo Bills on Saturday.

“My hope is to get the starters out there early in the game, get them some exposure,” Carolina coach Dave Canales said on Thursday. “And the importance of it to me is how valuable the night before prep is. Waking up in the morning, we have a 1 o’clock (Eastern time) kick — we got a lot of those this year — so just the body readiness. The plan behind this camp was to practice early so that we can have that readiness going into the season where most of our kicks are 1 o’clock, except for a couple of out-of-time-zone things, and, of course, we go to Germany.

“But this is a great opportunity to go through their pregame routines with each other, to have the communications on the sidelines as we go into the first drive there and just gather information, talk. This is how it’ll feel like, so I love this opportunity for the guys.”

On Tuesday, Young said he’d be ready to open his second season as the Panthers quarterback on Sept. 8 whether or not he played in the preseason.

“I trust in the coaching staff,” Young said. “They have our best interests at heart. Obviously, they manage the team. they know what they’re doing, so for me and for us, we trust whatever it is that they want to do. …

“I’ll be comfortable either way. Again, I know that they’re not just waking up and rolling the dice. There’s a reason for everything. They’re very calculated in what they’re doing.”

Canales said he would manage Young’s time on the field “on feel” in Carolina’s final preseason game.

“Just depends on how much work we get,” Canales said. “I’d love to get them sweaty. I’d love to get them the full work of coming, playing and play out, so we’ll have to play that part by ear.”

Canales is preparing for his first season as the Panthers’ coach. He came to Carolina after working as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator. He said he had specific markers that would indicate if the offense had a firm handle on his playbook.

“I’m looking for confidence and speed of play,” Canales said, “so I know we’re in our wheelhouse when our guys, they get up to the line fast, they come off the ball fast, they finish the plays. All of those things come alive when I know they’re really focused and know exactly what they’re doing. That’s what’s going to tell us who we are and what we can execute.”

Canales said he had not wanted to put the first team on the field during the preseason until he felt confident about their mastery of the offense.

“It was really just about the grasp of the system,” Canales said of his decision, “going back to that, talking about the confident play. And I was open to playing them in the first one. I was open to playing in the second one. We had that great week of work against the Jets. And we had a couple of guys we knew we were going to get back this week. So it was like: Why don’t we wait another week to get a stronger group to put out there?

“But again, watching the practices, watching those first couple of games and seeing, ‘OK, it feels like we have a great grasp of what we’re doing now, so that we can go out there and be confident.’ I didn’t want to go out there and just kind of stumble around stuff as we’re still figuring out our schemes and all that.”

Young said he felt “very confident” running the offense.

“We’ve had everything in for a while now,” Young said, “and it’s just been getting different reps, having different formations, different criteria for kills and stuff, different intricacies of the play that we’ve tweaked. But all the stuff we’ve had is in, which has been great for us, being able to get through it early. I think the coaches did a great job of how they installed stuff.”

After the Panthers picked Young at No. 1 in the 2023 NFL Draft, the former Alabama All-American started 16 games for Carolina as a rookie. But the Panthers won only two of those contests and produced the fewest yards in the NFL last season.

Young foresees improvement in Canales’ system.

“I think that we do a great job of taking what the defense gives,” Young said, “but also dictating the terms of what we want do. I think we’re very multiple. It’s a good mixture of run, play pass, drop back, movement, some creative stuff that we do as well. And I think just being able to have different ways to get and attack similar things, I think that that’s really important. Again, that’s something we talk about a lot as a unit — making sure that we can try to be complex in how we make things happen, but, for us, making sure that we’re consistent in the stuff we do.

“And also there’s a lot of defined rules, which really help. There’s a lot of things that I’m watching last year. Tampa, obviously, same division, so we watch a lot of the same things. A lot of plays that you’re like, ‘Man, those are super-instinctual, super-niche throws. How do they get in that timing?’ And then hearing it now, there’s a lot of rules that define stuff. A lot of: Versus this look, we’re getting to this exact depth, this exact amount of steps, things like that. So just us being able to be on the same page throughout all that, making a lot of that clear is really helpful for me, helpful for the entire unit. So, again, it’s exciting for us to continue to build off that.”

The Panthers and Bills square off at noon CDT Saturday at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, New York.

Carolina will kick off its regular season against the New Orleans Saints at noon Sept. 8 at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.