CHARLOTTE, N.C. — There is a sense around the Carolina Panthers that this year will be different.
Of course, losing teams always hope this, and it’s easier to believe it when you haven’t lost a real game in nine months. The Panthers haven’t played anything that counted since Jan. 9, 2022, when their two quarterbacks were Sam Darnold and Cam Newton and they got pounded, 41-17, by Tampa Bay.
They will field a team that’s a good bit different in 2022, but the coach directing it all is the same. Matt Rhule enters his third season in the NFL with no certainty he’s going to get a fourth.
Rhule’s two Panther teams have gone a combined 10-23, the sort of record that can — and sometimes will — get you fired. But Rhule also has been a turnaround master in college, where he posted golden seasons in his third year at both Temple and Baylor. This was part of the reason owner David Tepper hired Rhule and also has kept him around for Year 3 — the sensible idea that rebuilding takes time. It also helped that Tepper never believed that Rhule lost the team’s confidence in Year 2, despite the fact that the team itself lost its last seven games in a row, plummeting from 5-5 to 5-12.
If you’ve barely checked in on the Panthers in the past nine months, that’s totally understandable. Here’s a one-paragraph crash course on what has happened since:
They’ve got a new, flashy quarterback in Baker Mayfield, a new offensive line and a new offensive coordinator. Christian McCaffrey is healthy again (for now). The team’s half-built, opulent new training facility in Rock Hill never materialized and now has descended into legal chaos. The Panther defense lost some pieces, gained some pieces and still should be good. Two reserve quarterbacks and the starting kicker got hurt in the preseason.
Holding all this together will be Rhule, whose charisma and likability has never been in question, but whose “Can he win in the NFL and not just in college?” bona fides certainly have been.
Rhule and Panthers general manager Scott Fitterer have been trying to solve the QB situation ever since they got here. It hasn’t worked yet. Their fortunes will be tied to Mayfield more than any other player this season, as Carolina rolls with a quarterback who only got to Charlotte in early July and only after his former Cleveland team gave Deshaun Watson a ridiculous contract (one even more ridiculous than what the Panthers were proposing) and made Mayfield expendable.
Mayfield, of course, will play his former team Cleveland in Week 1 in Charlotte. He told a Buffalo Bills sideline reporter that he was going to do some anatomically difficult things to the Browns in this opener — or maybe he didn’t say it that way at all — and regardless it was supposed to be a private conversation and the reporter admitted as much afterward. In any case, Mayfield will have a stern test immediately, and then 16 more of them coming around the bend if he can stay healthy for all of them.
Rhule has to have Mayfield play well, needs McCaffrey to stay healthy and could use a serious dose of good luck, too. After a 5-12 season in 2021, the coach will have to show progress this season to get to a fourth — 9-8 would probably be enough, but 7-10 quite likely wouldn’t.
Almost all college and NFL football coaches get fired at least once, and it’s happened to Rhule before. As he told me the story recently, he was the defensive line coach at Buffalo (the college, not the NFL team).
“I’ll never forget it,” Rhule said. “We came home at 3 a.m. after losing to Northern Illinois, 73-10. And the head coach had a meeting and said, ‘They’re going to let us go.’
“I remember telling my wife, ‘I don’t have a job.’ We had about two games left. And my Dad — an old coach and also a minister — told me, ‘You’re going to be tempted to pick up the phone and making calls and all those things. But however you coach these next two games is really who you are as a coach.’ And that’s affected me.”
Tepper has shown laudable patience with Rhule. As I wrote at the end of last season, I thought Rhule should get one more season to prove himself. Tepper has not been nearly so patient in some other situations. He fired Charlotte FC head coach Miguel Angel Ramirez less than halfway through the expansion Major League Soccer team’s first season.
Predictably, Charlotte FC hasn’t made any sort of magical run under the new coach. Changing coaches in midstream rarely works — the talent level remains the same and that’s often what caused the problem in the first place.
Rhule has the most talented of his three Panther teams now, however. The offensive line, in particular, should be better. That will give Carolina — and Rhule — a chance to climb the mountain.
He’d better capitalize on it.
