Xs and Os Aren’t Everything, But They Also Aren’t Nothing
There are lots of different ways to be effective as a head coach in the NFL and the idea that everybody has to be some kind of schematic genius in order to be effective is false, but it is also foolish to pretend that a huge amount of what goes on on Sundays is not heavily impacted by scheme. Ron Rivera did not call plays on defense until the shakeup at the very end of last season, and while he was able to rely on Sean McDermott for the first six years of his tenure that was fine, but with McDermott no longer in Carolina, it’s become harder and harder to justify having a defensive head coach on a team as the defense continues to struggle.
This is illustrated clearly when you look at how the Panthers’ defense has changed since Sean McDermott has left.
In his final four seasons as the Panthers’ defensive coordinator, Sean McDermott had the Panthers ranked an average of 8th in the NFL, in the three seasons since, the Panthers ranked 19th on average while McDermott’s Bills have ranked 8th. This not only illustrates that McDermott was – and is – a very good defensive coach, but just how dependent on McDermott the Panthers’ defense was. Him being around allowed Ron to focus on what he does best, but ultimately as the head coach you need to be able to succeed, at least to some degree, without having great assistants.
If you want to look at exactly why the Panthers failed on the field in the Rivera era it was because they had the talent to always be competitive, but they lacked the schematic processes to have consistent success. It was not a coincidence that Tepper repeatedly talked about process when addressing the media this week.
In his first season in San Francisco, Kyle Shanahan lacked the talent on both sides of the ball to build a team that was going to compete to make the playoffs, but he had systems in place that meant that his team was consistently in games with far more talented teams as they put the players they did have in the best positions to be successful. Rivera’s teams were never awful, as they were too talented to lose consistently, but they never had the ability to consistently put themselves in positions to succeed. As good as Rivera was at getting his players to show up emotionally, from a tactical point of view, they were often overly reliant on the talent of individuals to overcome the tactical superiority of the opponents – while that allows you to go 15-1, it also makes it hard for you to have any long-term consistency.
This is really the lesson to take away when examining the Ron Rivera era; while NFL coaches are more than just the schemes they run, they have to be able to fall back on some kind of schematic grounding at some point. If that is left entirely up to the coordinators, you are likely going to find yourself constantly chasing to find new, bright schematic minds while the ones you do find are inevitably hired away to be head coaches themselves. Whoever ends up as the next head coach doesn’t necessarily need to be the next Kyle Shanahan, but they have to at least be able to hold their own in this regard.
You Can Never Stop Getting Better
If this was a book, there are several other things that could be discussed in terms of Ron’s strength’s and failings. His intermittent embracing of analytics, his over-loyalty to certain players and coaches and his reluctance to take risks being just a few areas there isn’t time or space to cover in detail here. However, in all of these regards – with the possible exception of the analytics – there is something of a continuous theme for the Rivera Era, and this is ultimately what caused his firing.
The Ron Rivera who is coaching in 2019 is really hardly any different from the Ron Rivera who was coaching five years ago.
The issue with this is that everybody has flaws, and if you expect the next coach to come in and be perfect from day one, you will be disappointed; but what made the Ron Rivera era so frustrating for many of us watching was that the things that were going wrong five years ago were still going wrong as recently as this past Sunday against the Redskins – and there was little sign of them ever getting better. The things Ron had issues with when the Panthers went to the Super Bowl haven’t changed, and given that his answer to being asked what he would have done differently this season was essentially, “Nothing, I just hope players hadn’t got hurt,” is really quite telling.
This is a man who believed in his process, and showed a near-absolute reluctance to change it. Let’s hope the next coach doesn’t fall into the same traps.
