With Matt Rhule in charge, the Carolina Panthers feel like an expansion team again
Matt Rhule was high on energy and low on specifics Wednesday during his first press conference in his new job.
“I will work tirelessly each day to bring you guys a championship,” Rhule, the new Panthers head coach, said, “because that’s what this region deserves.”
Rhule’s charisma and his gift for public speaking were all obvious. The man is a born motivator.
But the road to that potential Carolina Super Bowl win shimmering in the distance — the same vision the Panthers have been chasing unsuccessfully for the past 25 years — will be a bumpy one.
Rhule got a seven-year contract from owner David Tepper, which is a good thing, because this is going to take awhile. He inherits a Carolina team that finished 2019 on an eight-game losing streak. And his quarterback situation is iffy. Cam Newton’s last two seasons have ended prematurely by injury, and he has only one season left on his contract. I got the first question in at Rhule’s press conference, and figured I should ask about his plans for Newton.
Rhule’s response dodged the issue as adeptly as a matador sidestepping a bull.
“Yeah, to be quite fair,” he started, “I probably haven’t had a chance with regards to any player to talk with Marty (Hurney, the team’s general manager) and Mr. Tepper in terms of the long-term vision. I would never want to speak out of school. ... What I will say is this: I had a chance to talk to Cam yesterday and I have the utmost respect for him and what he’s done. And I love the way he talked to me, to be quite honest. He didn’t want to talk about the past, he wanted to talk about the future.”
Rhule was vague about what that uncertain future held, however, and said no more about their conversation.
I get that.
After 24 hours on the job, you don’t immediately say you’re going to move on from the team’s franchise quarterback for the past nine years. And with Newton’s injured foot still an issue, you also couldn’t say you’re definitely starting him opening day.
I still think Rhule, Hurney and Tepper will ultimately decide to part with Newton, either via a trade or a release, sometime this offseason. It’s not the $21.1 million Newton is due if he stays so much as it is that the Panthers are now in obvious rebuilding mode.
“We sort of have an open canvas,” Hurney said Wednesday when describing what sort of stamp Rhule can put on this franchise.
Or, as Tepper later said: “We’re in the building process here, and sometimes you have to tear things down to build them up.”
That doesn’t sound like the ideal situation for Newton, who will be 31 soon and entering his 10th NFL season. A place where they are tearing it down in order to build it back up? That sounds like a place where a young quarterback should be taking his lumps and growing along with his team.
But Rhule wouldn’t commit on his quarterback one way or the other, on that or much of anything else. He used the word “process” a lot, and the word “build,” and the word “toughness.” He did say that he generally favors a 4-3 over a 3-4 defense, which will be good news to Luke Kuechly fans. And he was funny telling a couple of stories about his family — he and wife Julie brought their three young children to the press conference.
Are Panthers in expansion-team mode?
I’ve been to the “First Day on the Job” press conferences for all five Carolina head coaches over the past 25 years. And you really can’t tell how it’s going to go from that day, no matter how much anyone pretends you can.
Do you know which one of those five had the most palpable level of excitement?
The one announcing George Seifert before the 1999 season.
Think about it. Seifert had already won two Super Bowls as a head coach in San Francisco. As a head coach, he boasted the highest winning percentage in NFL history. He was coveted by lots of people. His résumé sparkled. A lot of Panthers fans felt that day not too far off from the the way North Carolina fans felt in 2003 when Roy Williams finally came home.
And then it worked out terribly. Seifert is the only one of the four previous Panthers coaches to never make the playoffs. He was fired after three seasons when Carolina went 1-15 in 2001.
But Wednesday didn’t feel like the Seifert press conference. What it felt like was the press conference announcing Dom Capers as Carolina’s first-ever head coach in 1995. This press conference in 2020 had an expansion-team vibe, with plenty of references to blank slates, open canvases and building things from scratch.
That’s right — after 25 years, the Panthers are once again an expansion team.
That’s not all bad. That first Carolina team went 7-9 in 1995, and then the second one went all the way to the NFC Championship game. Things can change quickly.
Rhule got Temple and Baylor all the way out of the doldrums by Year 3, winning at least 10 games in both cases. In his first seasons at those jobs, though, he was a combined 3-19. He brought that record up himself Wednesday, making the point that it’s easy to talk about how to do things right in the offseason but harder when you start to lose games. Rhule promised, no matter what, to work hard every day and not throw his players under the bus.
Tepper praises Rhule for ‘no BS’
Panthers owner David Tepper is a Pittsburgh guy who in this coaching search was looking for his own personal Chuck Noll. Noll took over the Steelers in 1969, went 1-13 in his first year and then ended up winning four Super Bowls for Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Noll set the Steelers on a road to prominence, one they have rarely veered from over the past 40 years.
Rhule is supposed to be that sort of guy for Tepper. A program builder.
Said Tepper: “This is a guy who’s no bull----. He speaks plainly, says what he says, believes what he believes.”
That’s the way Tepper talks, too — although he’s blunter than Rhule. Tepper is pouring money into a new Panthers training facility in South Carolina. He likes the way Rhule talks about sports science and recovery and regeneration, about toughness and running the ball and playing good defense. The owner liked Rhule enough to pay him ridiculously good money to leave Baylor and come to Charlotte. Money, as usual, appeared to be little object to Tepper.
The Panthers have had a lot of bad days in the past three months.
This was a good one.
A happy one.
It all sounded rosy.
But they’re still going to have to figure out what to do at quarterback.
This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 6:22 PM.
