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.
Don’t let one mistake become two.
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.
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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: Is David Tepper the owner I want to go work for?
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: Don’t let one mistake become two.
“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, boom, 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.
Here’s the obvious part of that equation: Tepper, very clearly, is smart enough to pull it off.
From there, what you have to ask is what has to be asked of every new owner, and that’s whether he can find the right way to fit into the larger picture of building a successful football operation, because it’s been six years, and his 30–63 record shows that hasn’t come close to happening yet.
There are problems, according to those I’ve talked to who have worked there, and that is coming from people who’ve been clear with me that they really like Tepper personally.
One is that, coming from a world that’s very results-driven, his instinct is to apply that in a business that’s more process-oriented. One former staffer went so far as to say Tepper badly wants to be process-driven, “but he’s not. His wiring is just not that way.” Which, of course, goes back to the idea that when you see a bad investment, you dump it, rather than being patient with it.
That flows into a broader issue—that he can be a little overly reactive.
One example came with how Reich’s staff was assembled. Tepper felt like Rhule hired too many assistants who weren’t ready for their roles. He told people, after firing Rhule, that no Fortune 500 company would just hire one guy, then let that guy hire everyone else. He asked why it was like that in pro football. He also liked how the Giants went outside Brian Daboll’s tree to assemble a staff and how the 49ers capitalized on the NFL’s incentive system for having diverse coaches and scouts hired away.
So Reich was hired, and then a well-intentioned Tepper called for Reich to bring together a diverse all-star staff, with depth and experience within it. And it’s true that Reich hired a lot of good coaches. But they were coaches from different places, with different ideas, and it was always going to take time for that to mesh. The problem Reich had was the offense was lagging behind the other units, and there wasn’t enough adjusting or evolving, and all that was affecting the development of the quarterback.
And if there’s one other problem, according to those there, it’d be that Tepper does have his hands in everything, which is an issue because he’s not in the building daily. He’ll be around Friday through Tuesday or so of a game weekend and for the road trips, but he still lacks the day-to-day context needed to be that hands-on as an owner.
That said, Tepper, by all accounts, isn’t forcing decisions day-to-day on anyone. He gathers information. He makes suggestions. But he does try to be a resource and he knows what he doesn’t know.
The nitty-gritty football stuff isn’t his forte. But anything that involves analytics, probability or market value is. And that’s where people there think Reich really found himself in a rut with Tepper.
There was a situation in the Week 10 Thursday night game against Chicago where it crystallized. With the Panthers down 16–13 and facing second-and-10 on the Bears’ 41-yard line, Young missed on a downfield shot and then Reich burned his first timeout. Young was then nearly picked on third down, and from there Reich sent out kicker Eddy Pineiro, whose career long was from 54 yards, for a game-tying 59-yard attempt.
Pineiro missed short (a probability graphic on the Amazon broadcast said he had a 21% shot of making it), the Panthers didn’t have enough timeouts to generate another legitimate possession and the game was effectively lost.
At that point, one former Carolina coach says, “I knew Frank was done. Those are the things [Tepper] knows. He knows you can’t do that. Some of those high-percentage third- and fourth-down decisions, you can’t f--- those up. He will be mad. And it’s not that you can’t go against the numbers, that’s how he made his money. It’s when they’re clear absolutes, like punting on a clear go or wasting a timeout, and then you can’t get the ball back. It’s the unforced errors.”
Two such occurrences happened in Week 12.
The first was just before the two-minute warning in the second quarter. Bryce Young hustled the offense to the line to get one last play off—and completed a pass to Jonathan Mingo for six yards to get the ball to the Carolina 26. The clock stopped. And because the clock stopped, an incompletion on the other side of the two-minute warning left the Titans with 1:39 to work with when they got the ball back. That one, the Panthers didn’t pay for, with Tennessee failing to get a first down and punting it back. The next one, they would.
After that punt, Young threw to Mingo for eight yards, getting the ball to the Panthers’ 18, and Carolina called timeout. The Panthers followed that, from deep in their own territory, needing just two yards for a first down, with incompletions that stopped the clock, forced a punt and allowed Tennessee to drive a short field to kick a 53-yard field goal.
Tepper wasn’t happy, to put it lightly.
What this has left Tepper with is, once again, a blank slate—and maybe a cleaner one than he’s had in the past. Young is the quarterback, yes, but outside of him, and maybe Ekwonu, there aren’t very many players on the roster about whom you can say definitively, Yes, the guy is still going to be with the Panthers three years from now.
And all this can paint a picture of what he may look for in his next coach. A leader who is hard-nosed enough to handle criticism, build a program and effectively handle all the big decisions in the game, the same way he handles the big-picture construction of the team.
That could be Detroit’s Johnson, a young, smart-as-a-whip guru whom you’d have to project as a leader, but who learned under one of the NFL’s best in that department, in Dan Campbell. It could be Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, who reached out to the Panthers last year about their opening, and has spoken with Tepper, and clearly has a great feel for building a program and managing the ins and outs of games and seasons.
Conversely, that person is going to have to be sure he wants to work for an owner who’ll push him and always look for answers—which could be good things for the right person.
“I like it,” said one Carolina staffer Monday night. “I want someone that wants to win as bad as I do.”
And of that, there is no question.
Tepper desperately wants to win.
But after six years, whether he can figure out how, in this new-to-him world of the NFL, remains an open question.
