Panthers’ Tepper ‘shakes the tree’ by firing Rivera -- and that’s just the beginning
Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper said he was patient for as long as he reasonably could have been while watched the team he bought in 2018 flounder its way through the past 28 games.
“But there’s a point where you have to realize you have to try to elevate a whole organization,” Tepper said Tuesday night. “And without shaking the tree, you can’t get any apples.”
So Tepper shook the tree hard Tuesday. He fired Panthers head coach Ron Rivera just four games before Rivera, 57, completed his ninth season. And that was just the beginning – Tepper has many more trees to shake over the next few months as he searches for more fruit.
By mid-March, I would bet Tepper has acquired a Major League Soccer franchise for Charlotte. He will certainly have hired Carolina’s new head coach by then, and decided where the Panthers’ training camp will be in 2020, and made more progress on the various stadium issues, and established whether quarterback Cam Newton is going to play in Charlotte in 2020.
There are plates spinning everywhere, and Tepper has gotten tired of waiting for anything else to drop. He had hoped to wait to fire Rivera at the end of the season instead of now, with a month to go.
But Tepper said he got wind that other nameless teams might already be starting coaching searches. He didn’t want to be put at a competitive disadvantage, but he also didn’t want to start talking to prospective coaches behind Rivera’s back, and so he sped up the process. Tepper and Rivera met face-to-face at Bank of America Stadium Tuesday, two days after the 29-21 loss to Washington. Tepper fired Rivera in what he described as an “emotional” meeting.
Tepper choked up once during a 30-minute press conference Tuesday night, after being asked about how Rivera and his wife, Stephanie Rivera, had participated in so many community events and how some fans who had gotten to know them would feel sad to lose them.
Said Tepper after regaining his composure: “I’m sad…. For the fans out there who love the Riveras? OK. I’m there, too.”
Rivera’s next job? Probably soon
Rivera will be OK. He will get another job, probably in the NFL, probably as a head coach, probably in 2020.
In fact, some sources inside Bank of America Stadium -- while surprised at the timing -- believe that Tepper did Rivera a favor Tuesday if he had planned to fire the coach anyway. Rivera gets a head start now on his own job search, with his name prominent on many lists, while Tepper gets a head start on the Carolina coaching search.
Although he said he would consider both collegiate and NFL coaches, and offensive and defensive specialists, reading between the lines Monday it sounded like Tepper wanted an offense-first coach, and one who also had NFL experience either as a head coach or a coordinator.
What he didn’t want, ultimately, was Rivera – whose Panthers began this season 5-3 but have since lost four straight games.
Rivera finishes his Panthers career as the most successful coach the team has ever had, with four playoff appearances and one Super Bowl appearance in nine years. He acquired the nickname “Riverboat Ron” in 2013 for his successful fourth-down gambling and he was considered by everyone to be one of the nicest guys in the game. He almost got axed after the 2012 season, just two years into the job, and even then he was aware of the tenuous nature of the NFL.
“I always feel like I’m coaching for my job,” Rivera said back then, when he narrowly escaped being fired. “It’s just like when I was a player. I was drafted in the second round in 1984. For nine years, I came into that facility in Chicago, wondering if I was going to get cut. This is no different. I come to work like I did as a player, and that’s to do the best I can.”
Rivera always did that, but he never broke Carolina’s dubious 25-year streak of never posting back-to-back winning seasons.
“Sometimes you just have to bring in fresh blood to change the culture,” Tepper said, “because it can’t be done otherwise.”
Panthers ‘kind of OK’
After Tepper bought the Panthers in 2018, he quickly determined that the business side of the operation had imploded. Said the owner: “I saw a business side over there that was a complete and absolute wreck… So we’ve made vast changes… There was nowhere to go but up.”
The football side, on the other hand, Tepper said he believed was “kind of OK.” He liked general manager Marty Hurney and said Monday he still believes Hurney – who now appears likely to stay on as GM – is “an excellent evaluator of college talent.” Rivera was an old-school, defense-first coach (as is interim coach Perry Fewell). But Rivera had also been the two-time NFL Coach of the Year (in 2013 and 2015) and became the winningest coach the Panthers ever had.
So Tepper watched and waited. He asked for Rivera to use more new-school analytics as a coach and said Monday that Rivera “accepted it to a certain extent.”
Carolina went 12-16 in the 1 ¾ seasons since Tepper bought the team from team founder Jerry Richardson, who had abruptly decided to sell after his involvement in a workplace misconduct scandal.
Tepper said he understands that quarterback issues (namely, Newton’s shoulder and foot injuries) have hamstrung the team in each of the past two years. But he didn’t want to wait any longer.
Fewell, currently the secondary coach, will be the interim coach for the season’s final four games. Scott Turner will replace his father, Norv, as the team’s offensive coordinator and will call the plays for the final four games.
Norv Turner will stay on staff, but in a reduced role. It is expected that Norv Turner will stay in the coach’s box on game days and Scott Turner will call plays from the sideline in what will be something of a tryout for a job for the younger Turner with the next Panthers coaching staff or elsewhere.
“We want to figure out the talent we have within, to see if there’s a possibility there,” Tepper said.
Winning will require ‘patience’
Tepper told a group of us reporters two weeks ago that he had been losing sleep over Carolina’s losses, and since then there had been two more. He said Monday that the home losses to compromised teams like Washington and Atlanta “played a little bit into the decision.”
As for how long it will take the new coach to achieve the “sustained excellence” Tepper keeps referencing, he said it would be silly to think it would happen immediately.
“You think I can promise to anybody that things are going to be great in one year?” Tepper said. “Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy? In Santa Claus?... If fans are expecting something to be miraculous next year -- listen, it could happen… but there has to be a degree of patience to build sustained excellence… Do (they) want to wait five years for sustained excellence, for 20 years of winning seasons? They better.”
Who will that next coach be? One betting site listed the top 10 possibilities in this order Tuesday: Jim Harbaugh (who once was briefly a Panthers quarterback); Jason Garrett; Josh McDaniels; Dan Quinn; Urban Meyer; Greg Roman; Mike LaFleur; Jay Gruden; Doug Marrone and Pat Shurmur.
Those men generally have jobs already – former Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy doesn’t, and I’d put him on that list, too -- but some of them won’t in a month. Soon, the coaching carousel will take another spin.
For the first time since early 2011, the Panthers will be riding it. Tepper isn’t waiting for anything anymore.
