Frank Reich and Ron Rivera talk Bryce Young, ACC football and the Panthers
Frank Reich and Ron Rivera, two former Carolina Panthers head coaches whose football paths have circled each other for decades, happened to be in Charlotte at the exact same time Tuesday.
What an odd coincidence it was, that two 63-year-old men born only a month apart and linked by so many threads had come back to the Queen City — not because of their deep NFL roots, but due to their new college football passions on the West Coast.
Reich is the interim head coach at Stanford for one year (and one year only, he insisted). Rivera is the new general manager of the California football program, his alma mater. In the new-look ACC, that means both men were part of the conference’s football media days on Tuesday.
The NFL kept poking its head in, though. Reich was walking in uptown Charlotte on Monday night, taking four of his Stanford players to dinner at Dean’s Italian Steakhouse, when he was hailed by a passing car.
“Coach Reich! Coach Reich!” someone shouted.
It turned out to be current Panthers quarterback Bryce Young, who pulled over and stopped to talk to Reich and the Stanford players.
Reich, of course, was the Panthers’ head coach when the team traded up and drafted Young No. 1 overall out of Alabama in 2023. Reich started Young right away for Carolina — he said Tuesday he would still do it all over again because it’s a “universal football principle” in the NFL to start the No. 1 pick on Week 1. But Young floundered in every way possible.
As the boos rained down, the Panthers began the 2023 season with a 1-10 record. Then owner David Tepper pulled the plug — firing Reich before his first year of his four-year guaranteed contract with the Panthers was even two-thirds over.
“All I know is I’m happy for Bryce,” Reich said Tuesday. “We all knew he was a good player. And the way it all started out for him? It was terrible. It was terrible for him, and it was terrible for all of us who were a part of it. And there were so many things to unwind there (with the Panthers) before it could get going in the right direction. But that just takes time.”
Reich didn’t want to elaborate on what exactly had needed to be unwound, but the coach who was the first starting quarterback in Carolina history in 1995 said he remains a Panthers fan. And he plans to move back to his home in Greensboro, where his wife has remained and where his grandchildren are nearby, once this one-year Stanford gig is complete.
“You know, not everything’s always fair,” Reich said Tuesday, speaking generally about his career. “It doesn’t always work out for me. But I’ve had so much work out for me, in so many ways over so many winning seasons as a coach and as a player. You get a couple of bad ones along the way, you just kind of take it with a grain of salt, learn from it and move on.”
Rivera, Kuechly and Young
Rivera scheduled himself to have lunch with Panthers legend Luke Kuechly on Tuesday. He had enlisted Kuechly to talk to one of his current Cal players in hopes of getting some NFL-level inspiration.
Before that lunch, we sat down and talked. Rivera, who won a Super Bowl with the 1985 Chicago Bears as a backup linebacker, remains the winningest coach in Panthers history.
Like Reich, Rivera was also fired by Tepper, the owner who bought the Panthers in 2018 and hasn’t overseen a single winning season since. But Rivera coached 140 games compared to Reich’s 11 with Carolina and led the team to its single finest season ever — the 2015 NFC championship season, when Carolina won 17 games.
If T.J. Watt hadn’t wrecked Cam Newton’s shoulder halfway through the 2018 season, who knows? Rivera might still be the Panthers head coach.
While football remains football — both men said that Tuesday — Rivera marvels at some of the differences between the college and pro games.
One of his biggest challenges?
“Understanding the rules,” said Rivera, who is heavily involved in fundraising, administration, fund allocation and recruiting for Cal. “As soon as you get a good feel for them, they change, because it’s a very volatile climate.”
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What are some of those weird rules?
“Why are players allowed to move after they sign contracts?” Rivera said. “That’s very foreign to me.”
Rivera also bemoaned the influx of some “predatory,” non-certified agents into the lives of high school teenagers, dangling the idea of big money in front of the prospective college recruits and their parents but sometimes charging, Rivera said, “more than 20%” of the contract value for their services.
Ron Rivera on Dave Canales
Rivera said he likes his new job, though, and certainly his shelf life should be longer than Reich’s new job. While Reich plans to be back in North Carolina by summer 2026, Rivera is trying to help California reach the next ACC level (Stanford was 3-9 last season for the fourth year in a row; Cal was 6-7).
Rivera and his wife Stephanie both graduated from Cal and have long been involved with the school. When Cal wanted to hire him, they actually approached Stephanie Rivera first.
As for the Panthers, Rivera praised head coach Dave Canales and his decision to bench Young two games into the 2024 season.
“I think the most courageous thing Coach Canales did last year is when he had to bench the No. 1 pick,” Rivera said. “It could have done a lot of damage. But the thing that I have to credit Bryce for was he had the right approach and right attitude….He stayed engaged. He was part of the team. He didn’t go into his shell and curl up and just become this distant memory.”
Rivera makes a lot of decisions now, but he doesn’t get to make ones exactly like that anymore. He said that he did miss coaching — “the intimacy of really being in the middle of it all,” as Rivera said.
Reich has that coaching intimacy back this season in Stanford, temporarily, where he will work with Andrew Luck, the Stanford GM who was once Reich’s quarterback with the Indianapolis Colts and is now his boss.
So Reich and Rivera will face off this year when Stanford plays Cal in what they call the “Big Game” on Nov. 22. The Panthers, oddly enough, will be in California that weekend, too, preparing to play the 49ers.
As anyone who has watched the Panthers for any length of time knows well, the football world turns in some unpredictable ways. But it’s good to see two solid, similar guys like Reich and Rivera still leading young men, even though it’s now 3,000 miles away.
