Cam's ceiling is scary high, both on a per game, and per season level.
Last year was a down year for Cam and Ryan's best year by a good margin - they scored about the same. What am I missing?
This is true, Cam had a 'down' year relative to his rookie year - and (outside of his personal development) nothing on the team has changed to suggest he will return to rookie year form or exceed it. The team still has an old WR1 and not much else. I mean maybe you can quibble and suggest LaFell will get better. Maybe he will. But it's clear Carolina did not add either of (a) a beastly WR or TE or (b) an OC who has a record of exploiting running QBs for all they're worth. Now there's a certain argument that goes along the lines "Cam STILL did it last year, without those weapons, so he can this year again." And of course he's a young QB still getting better. But he's swimming upstream, and will have to make a huge output of scoring basically by himself - by running and by chucking to basically league average receiving options.
Ryan OTOH had a good year by his standards, in fact a career year thus far. Unlike Cam, there are still factors to suggest he will either replicate or surpass last year's career year. He still has two WRs better than Cam's WR1, and a TE basically equal to Olsen for purposes of this year. Ryan himself could actually regress slightly in his own ability (or simply match last year), yet put up
better numbers because Julio is a year better and a year closer to having all the skills that only Megatron currently possesses.
People last year (FF Ninja, Pantherclub IIRC) basically argued against Ryan by saying "What are ya gonna do, project a career year??" Yes, that's exactly what I did and will do for this year. He's 28 years old, playing in a dome, with the best receiving weapons in the league. It's no longer his first but SECOND year playing in a wide-open aerial attack. Of course SJax could tip the balance back towards a run team, but I don't think they brought in a 30 year old RB to try to replicate the offense from 2-3 years ago with Turner.
It would be silly to project Manning or Brady for career years because they are too old. It would be silly to project Tannehill, Dalton, or probably even Cam for career years because they are too young. It makes perfect sense to project a QB for a career year IF (1) the receivers a QB has for a given year are likely to be the best receivers he will ever play with, AND (2) he's in the window for peak performance. I simply don't understand the logic that we should never project a player to have a career year when all of the factors point to it.