Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper has often said, when referring to his attempts to rebuild the team into a playoff-caliber squad, that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
But Tepper abruptly decided that Matt Rhule wasn’t the right head contractor to build the shining city that the owner envisions but has never been able to make happen. Tepper fired Rhule Monday, less than a third of the way through the coach’s third season as the Panthers’ head coach. Steve Wilks will serve as the team’s interim head coach for the rest of the 2022 season.
Rhule leaves the Panthers with an overall record of 11-27 over his 38-game tenure, with his final game the 37-15 home loss to San Francisco Sunday where, again, boos and calls of “Fire Matt Rhule” were heard in the home stands.
Rhule’s fatal flaw was this: He never solved the quarterback problem. Everything else stemmed from that.
Tepper said in April 2022: “I believe in Matt and he has my full support.”
But six months later, that changed dramatically, with Tepper firing a coach in midseason for the third time in his four-year tenure as a Charlotte pro sports owner. Tepper also fired Ron Rivera with four games left in the 2019 season — the Panthers were 5-7 at the time — and fired original Charlotte FC coach Miguel Angel Ramirez less than halfway through the team’s inaugural Major League Soccer season in May 2022. (Tepper owns Charlotte FC, too).
In other words, Tepper isn’t a patient man. The hedge-fund billionaire also hasn’t found nearly the success as a pro sports owner as he has in the business world. The Panthers are now 23-47 under his stewardship and have never made the playoffs. Tepper bought the team in 2018, after a scandal-ridden Jerry Richardson sold it. If you count interim head coaches, Wilks will be the fourth head coach in just over four years under Tepper. A new coach, assuming one is hired in January 2023, will be the fifth. That ain’t good.
Wilks immediately started adjusting his coaching staff. Defensive coordinator Phil Snow, Rhule’s longtime and very loyal right-hand man, is gone. The Panthers also parted ways with assistant special teams coach Ed Foley, another coach with long ties to Rhule. Wilks, who was the Arizona Cardinals’ head coach in 2018, had Al Holcomb as his defensive coordinator there and is expected to have Holcomb become the new defensive coordinator for the Panthers.
The Panthers have also cycled through high-level executives — as has the MLS team — at a sometimes dizzying rate. And they got into a rock fight with Rock Hill over an opulent training facility that never was completed and now sits in South Carolina like a forlorn ghost town. In other words, Tepper shares blame for all this inconsistency.
Was firing Rhule Monday the right move? A lot of Panther fans will be happy because now someone is getting blamed. And to me, this had an air of inevitability. I would have let Rhule get at least halfway through Year Three before pulling the plug, but it was going to get pulled, one way or another. So yes, it had to happen, whether today or in a month.
Much of this turmoil stems from the fact that ever since former NFL Most Valuable Player Cam Newton got hurt and went on the decline, the Panthers never figured it out at quarterback. The NFL is a quarterback-dependent league, and if you don’t have one, it really doesn’t matter what else you have.
The Panthers’ QB quandary
Rhule alone has gone through Teddy Bridgewater, Newton 2.0, Sam Darnold and now Baker Mayfield, who came in with high hopes and so far may have been the worst of all of them (and is now hurt, to boot).
The coach also passed on drafting Justin Fields, Mac Jones and Kenny Pickett. The Panthers may well draft a quarterback in the first round in 2023 and let that guy and 2022 third-round draft pick Matt Corral battle it out, because both Darnold and Mayfield are on expiring contracts.
Rhule understands that he didn’t win enough, and that winning is the name of the NFL game above all else. He couldn’t duplicate his college football success at Temple and Baylor, where by Year Three he had the programs turned around and headed toward the mountaintop.
Anyone who has spent five minutes with Rhule knows he’s likable and would be an excellent next-door neighbor. But the “Fire Matt Rhule” chants came anyway at Bank of America Stadium, because he’s gone 5-11, 5-12 and now 1-4 in his truncated final season.
The Panthers committed the cardinal sin of being boring besides being bad. They never could score regularly, which led to the damning stat that Carolina was 1-27 under Rhule whenever the opposing team scored at least 17 points. If they had had a killer offense and an awful defense and were losing games 38-35, Rhule likely would have lasted longer.
But that combination of boring and badness meant that the stands started looking empty under Rhule, or else packed with opposing fans as Bank of America was Sunday, when 49ers fans absolutely took over the stadium. Carolina went a literal year between home wins recently, and that’s not the way to capture a home fanbase.
Mayfield, in retrospect, provided Rhule’s final chance. He clearly was better than Darnold in training camp, hitting one deep ball after another and showing good accuracy.
But Mayfield’s choppy feet in the pocket hurt him in the real games, and his accuracy suffered, and his receivers didn’t help him much, and he has had a tendency to panic a little bit once things started going poorly. Whereas Cam Newton had Greg Olsen to salvage third downs, Mayfield hasn’t yet figured out his favorite target.
Rhule knew he was in trouble
Rhule has known for a while that the sword of Damocles has been hanging over his head and probably made his peace with the idea that he could be gone at any time. Tepper had been conspicuously silent over the past six months, with no more public pronouncements of “he’s my coach” support.
Rhule’s defense has been good — although Snow is leaving anyway — and the offensive line is at least better than it was in 2021. But the result in close games has been no better, and Rhule has always known how to read a room. He knew he was in trouble. Tepper had kept Rhule for the third season in part because Rhule never lost the players in Year Two, but even the players’ support — and there was a lot of it Sunday, even after a 22-point loss — didn’t save him this time.
Don’t feel too sorry for Rhule. He’s rich by conventional standards. Tepper still owes him tens of millions. Rhule will be mentioned as a possibility for every high-profile college head coaching job there is until he decides to take one. He will go down as one of those college coaches who couldn’t make the leap to the pros, just like Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier weren’t able to. But Rhule is only 47, and he’s got another head-coaching job, or two, in his future.
It won’t be here, though.
Rhule ultimately may have miscalculated when he decided on the Panthers job over the New York Giants position — he could have had either job in January of 2020. The Giants (a surprising 4-1 this season) already had quarterback Daniel Jones, while Carolina had a compromised Newton, lots of salary-cap issues and no clear answer at QB.
Rhule also miscalculated by not saying in his first press conference that the Panthers were going to have to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt. He didn’t sell it that way, and it would have helped for him to have lowered expectations as far as he possibly could have.
But what would have helped most is to have found a quarterback he could have trusted. Rhule always had that at Temple and Baylor, and that’s what helped those turnarounds immensely.
In Charlotte, it never happened.
And that, ultimately, was Rhule’s downfall.
