As the NFL season comes down the stretch, we will also see the business of football start to ramp up toward the usual offseason activities. Today we’ll look at one team that fired a coach and one team that has not been able to field a starting-caliber quarterback.
Carolina blue
There was a time in the NFL when it was unheard of to fire a head coach after one season on the job. Now that happens, it seems, annually. But a head coach firing before the end of his first season seems over the top. Yet that just happened for the third straight year. Last season the Broncos fired Nathaniel Hackett after 15 games. Even Urban Meyer, a train wreck with the 2021 Jaguars, lasted 13. But Carolina coach Frank Reich got to only 11 games before being dismissed by Panthers owner David Tepper last week.
Thirteen months ago, Tepper fired Matt Rhule barely three years into a seven-year deal, with $40 million left on his contract. Now Reich has been fired in the first year of a four-year deal, with roughly $30 million left on his contract. Tepper has now put both of them into my Business of Football Hall of Fame.
Some have suggested Tepper is a meddlesome owner in the mold of Jerry Jones, albeit without the experience in the NFL. Others have likened him to now former Commanders owner Daniel Snyder with his lack of awareness. While those comparisons are fine, I liken him much more closely to another NFL owner. He is this decade’s version of Browns owner Jimmy Haslam.
Haslam’s early tenure in the NFL was defined by a slew of hirings and firings, spending away until he (hopefully) got it right. Haslam fired multiple coaches (including Pat Shurmur, Rob Chudzinski, Mike Pettine and Hue Jackson), as well as front office executives (among them Joe Banner, Michael Lombardi, Ray Farmer, Sashi Brown and John Dorsey) while content to pay out tens of millions of dollars after their terminations. Similarly, Tepper will soon hire his seventh head coach, including interim coaches, since buying the team in 2018. Tepper also shared Haslam’s yearning for Deshaun Watson, a sweepstakes in which Tepper lost out to Cleveland’s exuberant contract offer.
Tepper oversaw—some have said engineered—a franchise-defining trade to acquire last year’s No. 1 pick, quarterback Bryce Young. While it is way too early to make judgments on Young’s career, the early returns have not been good. Young is small in stature, which can be justified by some truly special skill, such as Kyler Murray’s speed and escapability, or a strong arm, but he has neither of those. His major asset out of Alabama was performing at his best in the biggest spots; that has not translated with the Panthers.
To acquire the right to draft Young, Tepper sold off the team’s top receiver (DJ Moore), the No. 9 pick in the 2023 draft (which became Jalen Carter, the league’s top defensive rookie) and its ’24 first-round pick, which could be the top pick and a quarterback better than Young. This is the kind of trade package offered up for a perennial All-Pro player, not an undersized quarterback who has never played pro football.
Tepper will keep hiring and firing, as the Panthers are a bad team without a first-round pick and not likely an attractive free-agent destination. Sure, they can build and take a long-term approach, but it doesn’t seem like Tepper has the patience for that. He comes from a different world where money can buy success right away, damn the consequences. And there has been no success and lots of consequences.
These are some Carolina blue times.
