There’s a saying Panthers owner David Tepper uses with his football people that those staffers have been told comes straight from the world of high finance.
It is that mantra that might best connect how he runs a hedge fund with how he’s run his football team—and it can go a long way in explaining both what happened Monday morning in Charlotte and the challenge he’s still facing through a labored, painful adjustment to running an NFL franchise.
Frank Reich is gone now. The writing had been on the wall over the last couple of weeks, as Tepper’s displeasure with the situation became clearer and clearer internally.
But there are bigger questions going forward for the franchise, and most center on where the owner’s presence alone leaves the Panthers heading into what’s expected to be a very competitive coaching market. One former Carolina staffer predicted Monday that Tepper would circle back to Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, after the team and coach flirted pretty seriously last year, and work to lure the 38-year-old with a big bag of cash.
And the cold, underlying reality is that he might need to. Because for any prospective replacement for Reich, or for others looking at jobs in that organization, and especially for those with options (Johnson should have at least a few), a simple question needs to be asked:
What would give anyone pause is the track record Tepper has accumulated since being approved as owner, after paying $2.275 billion to buy the team from Panthers founder Jerry Richardson, in May 2018. Reich’s ouster was the third midseason firing Tepper has overseen, meaning when this wretched year for the franchise ends, interim coaches Perry Fewell, Steve Wilks and Chris Tabor will have led the team in 22 of Tepper’s 99 games as owner.
In other words, six years in, Tepper’s had an interim coach for 22% of his games.
How does that happen? Well, it goes back to that saying: .
“His thing is, the minute it gets bad, it’s going to get worse, so we better try something else,” says one former Panthers staffer. “He’s a hedge fund guy; that’s what hedge fund guys do. The second something stops earning money, they take their money out of it, take the profit and move on to something else.”
“He doesn’t care about the money,” says a former Panthers coach. “He looks at it like a stock—you make a poor investment, there’s a sunk cost, , you move on.”
And that sounds good on paper. The problem is, in pro football, if you keep churning through coaches and scouts and philosophies, you wind up with collections of talent that go together like scrambled eggs and ice cream.
So it is that there’s a positionless defensive player, in Jeremy Chinn, drafted to play for Matt Rhule, who was excellent early in his career then fell into disuse simply because he didn’t fit new defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero’s defense the way he did Phil Snow’s. So it is that the left tackle Ickey Ekwonu, who played great as a rookie, had some of his physical limitations (namely, his length) show up this year in a way they didn’t last year. So it is that another lineman, Bradley Bozeman, has seen a similar fate after the staff changes.
The blood from those messes is, very much, on Tepper’s hands. He’s the one who picked the coaches, who chose to move on from them and who signs everyone’s checks.
As a result, whoever’s next has a big job in front of them, with Brian Burns currently in a contract year, Derrick Brown heading into one in 2024, and questions in key spots all over the roster after the big-box trades both involving players coming (Bryce Young) and going (Christian McCaffrey, DJ Moore) of the last year or so.
So, again, the question for any coach coming is going to be whether Tepper is the right the guy to facilitate that sort of ground-up project, one that’ll have to be done without the top-five pick that belongs to the Bears as a result of the Young trade.
