‘Thank you.’ Former Panthers coach Ron Rivera publicly says goodbye, vows to coach again
NFL head coaches don’t often hold a goodbye news conference the day after they get fired, but Ron Rivera was not your typical NFL head coach.
He was nicer, for one thing. More down to earth. If you met him, you liked him quickly and respected him more every year you were around him. He was always the same guy, a rock of stability.
And he won a lot. I’ve covered all 25 years of Panthers football, and Rivera was the best coach in Panthers history. And he’ll be a good coach for someone else before long.
“My intent is to coach again -- I love coaching,” Rivera said during his 30-minute news conference Wednesday morning.
Did he want a break first?
“I’ve got four weeks off, OK?” Rivera, 57, said, getting a laugh during what wasn’t as somber a press conference as you might expect.
As for getting fired by owner David Tepper with a month still left in the season, Rivera said: “I was surprised. If anything, I thought it would happen at the end of the season, to be honest with you.”
Rivera’s firing from the job he has held since 2011 has made for a strange 24 hours in the Panthers’ world. Tepper choked up while describing Rivera’s virtues Tuesday. But Tepper fired the coach anyway, after watching Carolina go 12-16 in the 28 games since Tepper bought the franchise for $2.275 billion in 2018.
“Sometimes you just have to bring in fresh blood to change the culture,” Tepper said Tuesday, “because it can’t be done otherwise.”
Rivera, who interviewed for eight previous NFL coaching jobs before he got the one with the Panthers, nearly got fired after the 2012 season by then-team owner Jerry Richardson.
Instead, Rivera survived and went on to coach nearly seven more seasons for Carolina. He picked up the nickname “Riverboat Ron” when he started going for it on fourth down well before the current analytics craze. His house literally caught on fire, leaving him to experience Southern hospitality in all its neighborly glory. He coached Cam Newton to an NFL Most Valuable Player Award and Luke Kuechly to an NFL Defensive MVP Award. He started saying the word “y’all” and picked up a hint of a Southern twang. He wore T-shirts advocating various charitable causes to dozens of news conferences.
And he used the words “missed opportunities” a lot -- so much so that he brought two final T-shirts to display in his final news conference, and the first one had the words “Missed Opportunities” emblazoned on it. It was a joke at his own expense, which was fitting because Rivera liked those kinds of laughs best of all.
Rivera won NFL Coach of the Year awards in 2013 and 2015. But he said Wednesday that the best coaching job he did was actually in 2014, when the Panthers started 3-8-1 but made the playoffs after winning four straight games, and then won a playoff game, too. He said his “biggest regret” was that the Panthers lost Super Bowl 50, to Denver.
Defiance in Ron Rivera’s voice
There was also some defiance in Rivera’s voice Wednesday when he referenced Carolina’s three straight NFC South championships from 2013-15. He said he was “tired” of hearing that Carolina had never had back-to-back winning seasons. Technically, that’s true, but Carolina also went to the playoffs three straight seasons during Rivera’s tenure, finishing 7-8-1 in 2014 but still winning the division.
“I’m proud I took over a 2-14 team and won back-to-back-to-back NFC South division titles,” Rivera said, and then repeated the sentence more loudly. “Three in a row, OK? ..... I want to make sure we’re straight on that. I get tired of hearing he couldn’t win two years in a row. No, we won three years in a row, so let’s get that straight. And we were the first team in the NFC South to do it, so I’m pretty doggone proud of that.”
Yes, it was time for Rivera to go. The team had gone flat too often since the last of those three division titles and the run to the Super Bowl in 2015. In the 60 games since the Panthers got beaten 24-10 by Denver in Super Bowl 50, Carolina has gone 29-31.
Quarterback issues had something to do with it, yes, but the bottom line was Carolina had been a disappointment to its fans in three of the past four seasons. Part of that has been due to Cam Newton suffering season-ending injuries each of the past two seasons. After missing 14 games this season, the Observer has confirmed through a source that Newton has now decided to undergo foot surgery (NFL Network first reported the surgery). Newton’s recovery period is uncertain.
Rivera will be replaced during the next four games by Perry Fewell, who was the team’s secondary coach and unsuccessfully interviewed for the Panthers head-coaching job that Rivera got in 2011.
Rivera also said that, in his 33rd year in the NFL as a coach or player, he knew full well that he would get fired one day.
“I didn’t come in with any false hopes,” Rivera said. “I came in being realistic and knowing that at some point, some day, I’ll be fired. And that’s just the way it is. You very rarely ever see a person leave this game on their own terms.”
Former Panthers coach treated everyone well
His players generally liked or loved Rivera – it was one or the other. Players like Newton, Christian McCaffrey and former Panther Josh Norman all took to social media Tuesday to praise Rivera.
Panthers tight end Greg Olsen once told me something about Rivera that keeps coming back to me. Olsen said: “In this league, everyone just assumes that in order to be a football coach that you have to be standoffish, secretive and a little bit of a (jerk). You don’t. You can demand guys’ respect and their ear by the way you treat people. Ron is the perfect example. He treats guys like men.”
Rivera treated everybody well. Men. Women. Children. The various beloved dogs he and his wife, Stephanie Rivera, nurtured.
That’s why this parting became so hard for most everyone involved. Necessary, but hard.
Rivera told his players goodbye Wednesday morning, and he told them he loved them. And then, not wanting to but knowing he had to, he left the meeting with the players and came to his news conference.
Asked what he wanted his legacy to be, Rivera said: “That we came in and did the best we could. That we were able to help, and touch, and change some things. And that when we leave, hopefully we left it a better place.”
Then Rivera displayed one final T-shirt, a gray one with black capital letters.
It displayed two words: “Thank you.”
This story was originally published December 4, 2019 at 8:46 AM.
