Perry Knotts/Getty Images
Demanding the team to “win now” is backfiring in a major way.
This was supposed to be a year where the Carolina Panthers turned the page and became competitive, but everything is going to hell. Carolina is the only 0-5 team in the NFL right now, Bryce Young and the offense aren’t gelling, and owner David Tepper is desperate for immediate success.
The organization is at a breaking point, and Frank Reich did his best to give a political answer about the man who writes the checks wanting them to win right now.
“There’s different philosophies in ownership, you know what I mean? Some owners kinda stay away and don’t engage a whole lot, other owners do. His [Tepper’s] philosophy is he’s gonna engage, and listen it’s only been a short experience, but it’s been a really good experience. It hasn’t been fun — it’s not fun. Those meetings I wouldn’t characterize them as fun meetings, but those meetings make me better and I trust they make us better.”
It doesn’t take a lot of skill to read between the lines on this one. Reich isn’t going to throw his boss under the bus, but he clearly positions Tepper as someone who feels the need to be overly involved in the decision-making process when it comes to the Panthers. Frankly, it’s ludicrous to begin with that Tepper and Reich have already had meetings, plural, about how Carolina will get better considering it’s only five weeks into a total rebuild of the organization.
It’s rare that anyone re-invents the wheel when it comes to the NFL. Once in a great while someone will come along with a new philosophy on how to do things and it’ll work, but for the most part it’s a league of patterns. One resolute, objective truth in football is that owners meddling in the operations of the team NEVER works.
If you look around the league at the most meddlesome owners there’s no signs of sustained success. Jerry Jones and the Cowboys are perennial underachievers. Jim Irsay did tremendous damage to the Colts by hiring Jeff Saturday and then insulting Jonathan Taylor. Broncos ownership were heavily invested in trading for Russell Wilson to facilitate a sale, and the new owners instrumental in hiring Sean Payton — both of which have been a disaster. Meanwhile in Las Vegas, Mark Davis continues to cut his hair with a weed whacker while making horrific football decisions.
Every owner loves to take credit for a team’s success, and too many think they need to actually earn it. On some level it goes without saying that every owner truly loves the game of football, but that doesn’t mean they understand what it takes to win.
From the second David Tepper set foot in Charlotte he’s meddled. The man has wanted immediate success every single year, and when it doesn’t happen he takes more of a hands-on approach to ensure it takes place. That’s what led to the disastrous hiring of Matt Rhule, which set the team back five years — it’s what led to the treadmill of quarterback desperation ranging from Teddy Bridgewater, to Sam Dalton, to Baker Mayfield, then back to Dalton before finally settling on Bryce Young.
The only thing billionaires are less accustomed to than losing is not being liked. They set entire systems around them of ass-kissing yes-men so they constantly feel like a king. Whether it’s Elon Musk buying Twitter and insulating himself with Musk-worshiping cryptofreaks, or Tepper desperately wanting the city of Charlotte to love him — they share the DNA of meddling with things that aren’t that bad, and breaking them beyond imagination.
For what it’s worth, I don’t buy this idea that drafting Young with the No. 1 pick was purely a Tepper decision. Everything I heard from inside the Panthers organization leading up to the draft if that it truly was a tossup between C.J. Stroud and Young inside the building, and while people had their favorites, ultimately everyone bought into the idea of Young being the correct choice.
This is a problem beyond Young, however. This is a franchise in disarray. It’s 10,000 cooks in a busted kitchen with a boss asking them to churn out Michelin Star meals when most of their ingredients come out of a dumpster.
The biggest problem the Carolina Panthers have is a lack of a consistent or cohesive vision on how they need to build sustained success. We have a coaching staff looking to build slowly, a roster that needs a ton of work to be competitive, and an owner demanding the playoffs right now. It’s the team’s fault for not managing expectations, but it’s Tepper’s for not knowing when he needs to stay the hell away and just write the checks.
Until that changes, neither will the Panthers fortunes. The simple lesson for David Tepper is this: Just sit back, do nothing, and claim the credit at the end. It’s good, dishonest work, and a founding principal the best NFL franchises are based on.
