When David Tepper spoke after being approved by the NFL as the second owner of the Carolina Panthers, he said he cared about three things. The first was winning, the second was winning and the third, he paused to let the assembled media answer – but you can probably guess what it was.
Tepper reiterated that message when he spoke to the media on the field ahead of the Panthers Thursday Night Football game against the Pittsburgh Steelers – but that was in a different time, when the Panthers were 6-2, a team that had Super Bowl aspirations and a dark horse MVP candidate at quarterback leading Tepper’s new and most expensive purchase; now, seven weeks later, the Panthers are on the verge of a historic collapse, the wrong end of a seven-game losing streak with questions swirling about the long term health of their franchise quarterback and the fate of the only head coach he’s ever known.
Seven weeks ago, Ron Rivera was three wins shy of tying John Fox for the most wins by a coach in franchise history – he’s no closer today than he was when Tepper stood on the sidelines of Heinz Field and told us the biggest lesson he had learned from being a minority owner of the Steelers before purchasing the Panthers. That lesson?
Patience.
And now, only three weeks removed from an explosive CBS Sports report that continued losing would make Tepper antsy for a change, another report has surfaced, this one from NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, saying that David Tepper will be exercising some of that patience after a seven-game losing streak by the Panthers – that Rivera’s job is safe moving forward into 2019. But, just as after the loss to Tampa, the Panthers coach would not speak for the owner nor shed any light on a murky coaching situation as the Panthers may become the first team of 188 since 1970 to begin the season 6-2 and lose eight straight to finish 6-10.
“At the end of the day I’m not going to talk for the owner,” said Rivera after the Panthers 24-10 loss to the Falcons. “You can’t ask me questions that I don’t know the answer to; I don’t know where Ian [Rapoport] gets that. I can’t talk about whether or not he has or hasn’t. Again, the thing we all have to understand, moreso than anything else, is that it’s [Tepper’s] decision and Mr. Tepper has been great about everything. So again, we are going to just continue to more forward and continue to work.”
“There hasn’t been any added pressure – Mr. Tepper has been very good about it. He is not going along slinging anything around. He has been great, he really has. Again, the disappointment obviously is that we haven’t won – I get that. I understand.”
“We are in the business of winning.”
Rivera has already made changes of his own to jumpstart his team, firing two position coaches and taking over the defensive playcalling; while there was improvement shown Monday night against the New Orleans Saints, the big plays that have plagued the defense throughout the losing streak and even when the Panthers were winning popped up again as the Falcons had touchdown passes of both 75 and 44 yards – those are the plays that will haunt Rivera.
“That’s probably the biggest thing I’m going to have difficulty with just because we have tried to put ourselves into position to keep everything in front of us and we have been doing for the most part a pretty decent job,” said Rivera. “It’s just one or two flare ups.”
Whatever happens as the Panthers move into the offseason, changes will need to be made – the Panthers are losing – at the very least – a starting center and there are holes along both the offensive and defensive line that will need to be filled; a team that came into the season with the fourth-oldest roster in the league that was built to be a Super Bowl contender that doesn’t even make the playoffs will certainly be viewed as a disappointment.
“I really believe that seven weeks ago, we [were] a good football team and we’ve just got a bad record,” said veteran cornerback Captain Munnerlyn, whose future in Carolina is cloudy as the 30-year old nickel cornerback carries a $5m cap hit in 2019. “We just ran into some injuries, ran into some bad luck and just fell short.”
“I think our coaches did a great job of putting us in position – if you look at some of the plays that we gave up…they put us in position [and] we just didn’t make plays. I wouldn’t put nothing on our coaching staff – I think those guys work their tails off and they put us in position to make plays and we just didn’t make them.”
With one game remaining in 2018, the question now is which will weigh more for Tepper – his desire for winning, of which there hasn’t been much of over the past two months, or his desire for patience, of which he’s likely running out of.
