CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you’re reading this, Dave Tepper, and I know that you are:
I’m not mad.
You got testy with me at the end of your 25-minute news conference Monday afternoon, a few hours after you fired head coach Matt Rhule in your role as the Carolina Panthers’ billionaire owner. We had a 60-second exchange that ended up being fodder for social media, as I asked you when exactly you decided to fire Rhule — Monday morning? Sunday night? — and you got annoyed and said I should “know better” than to ask that question.
It went on awkwardly from there, as I asked again about your reasoning on firing Rhule five games into a 17-game season. Was it anything other than his overall win-loss record of 11-27?
“You’re not being very specific,” I said. “Is there something I’m missing?”
You said: “I actually read your columns, and I can go back to your columns and regurgitate them. So you can read your own columns, okay, for that answer.”
Well, thank you for reading and for your Charlotte Observer subscription! Although when I heard the word “regurgitate” right next to a reference to my work, I realized maybe this wasn’t a compliment.
Before it was asked, my question had already been pre-determined to be the final query of Tepper’s news conference. So it all ended on a jarring note. I wasn’t offended by any of it. Look, my wife and I have raised four teenagers. I’ve got a thick skin.
As for my actual job, I’ve had a bunch of prickly exchanges like that, but few were live-streamed. Since Monday I’ve gotten a lot of supportive messages from readers, picked up a few hundred new Twitter followers, saw some videos of the exchange combine for 100,000 views and laughed at a few social media comments like: “Tepper about to buy the Charlotte Observer just to fire Scott Fowler.”
This sort of thing does happen to journalists if you stay in the business long enough. In the 1990s, a few Panther fans once made banners that read “Fire Fowler” and “No Creditabilty” in Bank of America Stadium after I’d been involved in a small dispute with then-quarterback Kerry Collins, and yes, they spelled credibility exactly that way.
Some people like my column. Some people don’t. Either is fine. I just want you to read it. I pride myself on compassion and fairness, but I’m certainly not a cheerleader for the home teams. This isn’t the team website.
What the people watching the news conference don’t know is that after four years of you, Dave Tepper, making news in Charlotte, and me writing about it, we’ve bumped heads several times before. But we’ve also had enough honest conversations that a bit of teasing and/or testiness doesn’t matter in the slightest to me. I respect what you’ve done in Charlotte and in the business world and find you to be blunt and charismatic, which is catnip for a sports reporter.
So not that you’re offering, and not that I’m asking, but I definitely don’t need an apology.
What I do need and want, though — and what this city needs and wants — is for you to become a better owner.
What do I mean by better?
Let’s start with what you declared to be the most important thing Monday — winning. You’ve been the owner of the Panthers for 70 games, and they are 23-47 during that time. You bought the Panthers in the summer of 2018. They weren’t a very good football franchise by the second half of that year, because a bunch of standout players — most notably Cam Newton — were getting old. But they’ve actually been worse since you got here, if you judge by winning percentages (and both you and I do).
If you count interim coaches, Steve Wilks will be your fourth head coach in just over four years owning the team. And if you don’t hire him for the permanent position in January, you’ll be looking for your fifth.
An NFL team runs on its quarterback and its head coach, and you really haven’t found either one yet. You’ll start over at both spots before the 2023 season, maybe with a high draft pick that will save the day (we can only hope).
3 coaches fired in midseason
It has felt like this team has been spinning its wheels for years, and the crowds of opposing fans at Bank of America Stadium speak to that. Rhule understands that a lot of that is his fault. In a bottom-line business, he was 11-27 in two-plus years.
Then again, you signed Rhule to a seven-year, $62-million deal in January 2020 and kept talking about the “five-year plan” you were going to give him to succeed. He made it through less than half of that before getting the axe just before a team meeting Monday, where he at least got to say goodbye to the team and then was gone.
You mentioned that the Panthers lost some intensity in Rhule’s final game, a 37-15 shellacking Sunday courtesy of San Francisco in a stadium that was taken over by 49ers fans. I agree.
It’s also true that Rhule was the third coach you’ve fired in the middle of the season, joining Charlotte FC’s Miguel Angel Ramirez in 2022 and Panthers coach Ron Rivera in 2019. You share the blame here. You’re accountable, as you’ve said.
As for these high-profile departures over at 800 South Mint Street — they come from out of the blue sometimes. That was part of the reason for my original question about timing Monday. It wasn’t to imply you hadn’t been thinking about it firing Rhule and just did it on a whim.
It was more like I know you’ve been thinking about this for many months. But why now?
Specifically, what has changed between January, when you decided to keep Rhule for another season despite a 10-23 record, and October, when the Panthers started 1-4 but still had 12 games to go?
And of course there are other issues we didn’t even get into in that football-centric press conference: The Rock Hill rock fight. The Eastland Mall site that was going to host a youth soccer academy, until suddenly it wasn’t. The high-ranking Panther and Tepper Sports Entertainment execs who suddenly vanish without a trace.
It all feels a little unstable.
The good part about Tepper
It’s not all been bad under your leadership, of course. The stadium feels a lot more like a public trust these days than the private playpen it mostly seemed to be under original owner Jerry Richardson. I went to the Billy Joel, Garth Brooks and Rolling Stones concerts, and they were all a blast.
You claiming that “there never was music in Charlotte” until you got here was a bridge too far Monday — we weren’t all out there watching Andy Griffith and wishing somebody had a guitar before you showed up. But I understood the point.
In 2018, before you started to ramp it up, Bank of America hosted 15 events in the stadium.
In 2022, it will host 39.
That’s significant. So is the fact that you’re ambitious and pursued and won a Major League Soccer team, which was a perfect fit for our growing and diverse city. That team drew roughly 35,000 fans per home game in its inaugural 2022 season, which ranked second in the entire MLS. If you ask people around town, Charlotte FC has been a massive hit.
If you ask them about the Panthers, though, they’ll shrug. Or scream. Or bemoan all the money they’ve spent on tickets to watch bad football.
And now that Rhule is gone and can’t be their scapegoat anymore, most of the fans’ venom will be directed toward you.
All of that changes, of course, if the team starts winning regularly and the Carolinas start believing in you again. The partnerships you often speak of will start to form. The new stadium — or the nine-figure renovation of Bank of America Stadium — will happen in Charlotte.
It’s not too late. You’re not Dan Snyder, the Washington Commanders owner who seems to be the last to know that he’s forever doomed in D.C.
But Monday wasn’t a good day for anyone around the Panthers except the “Fire Matt Rhule” crowd, which got its wish.
I’ve covered the Panthers since their inception in 1995 and now watched five different head coaches get fired. Those days are always stressful. But then comes a brief honeymoon period, built on renewed hope that maybe things will now change for the better.
Make the most of that period.
Don’t worry about me. I’m not going anywhere.
Just fix the team.
And don’t ask for any public money until you do it.
