Are the Carolina Panthers doomed with David Tepper as their owner?
NFL Offseason Roster Review #1
From an optics standpoint, the past season could not have gone worse for David Tepper and the Carolina Panthers - and optics are only the beginning of their problems.
A year removed from selecting former Alabama quarterback Bryce Young with the first overall pick of the 2023 NFL Draft, the Panthers are hitting the reset button, firing general manager Scott Fitterer to finish a process that began when they fired head coach Frank Reich mid-season.
While the Panthers are more or less back at square one, the stories that came out of the building this season - headlined by Reich’s descriptions of his post-day game review sessions with Tepper - paint the picture of an owner run amuck. Tepper may not be haunted by the workplace culture allegations that drove former Washington owner Daniel Snyder out of the NFL, but as far as running the football operation goes, there are unfavorable parallels between the two.
From a pure football standpoint, the Carolina job is not nearly as attractive as it was a year ago. Ikem Ekwonu still has the physical tools that caused him to be selected 6th in the 2022 NFL Draft, but the pass-protection issues that plagued him in Year 1 did not improve in 2023. Bryce Young, the 1st overall pick, is coming off a rough first season, and while that is not a death knell, his rookie season highlighted that Young’s physical talent is modest by NFL standards; he may be able to push the ball downfield with timing and accuracy, but Carolina’s signal-caller can’t match the NFL’s top signal callers for arm talent.
To add to the issues, the Panthers don’t have a first-round pick this season, and are short a second-round pick in 2025. They do have an estimated $31 million in cap space (per Spotrac), but this team needs more than one or two pieces, and the bigger question looms: would it even matter if they get the parts they “need”?
Looking Back in Time: Carolina, Houston, Indianapolis, and Green Bay
If we rewind to the beginning of 2024, the Panthers, Texans, Colts, and Packers appeared to be in a similar boat. All four teams were set to roll out first-time starters at quarterback. All four teams were set up to lean on the run game during the transition - Carolina’s Adam Thielen and Indianapolis’s Michael Pittman Jr. were arguably the only “established” receivers on the four squads - as they developed those quarterbacks.
While Carolina’s lack of explosiveness at receiver ultimately doomed them in 2023, it’s difficult to say that their gambles at the position were fundamentally different than the other three squads listed here; going into the season, my evaluation of Houston’s Nico Collins and Carolina’s Terrace Marshall Jr. were quite similar (long, fairly explosive receivers who had lacked opportunities in their respective offenses), and Carolina took Jonathan Mingo in the second round, ahead of Tank Dell (Houston), Josh Downs (Indianapolis), and Dontayvion Wicks (Green Bay), who all out-produced the more heralded Mingo. The Panthers also added the oft-injured DJ Chark, and while Chark’s struggles to get on the field continued, he did provide a downfield presence once he was on the field.
The point of all this? It's hard to say that the investments in these four offenses were dramatically different, but the results have been all over the place. With Anthony Richardson sidelined early in the season, the Colts get a mulligan, but if the Panthers, who play in the lowly NFC South, had known that not one, but two of these teams would be playing in the NFL's Divisional Round, they would have surely thought they had a chance to be one of those teams. Instead, C.J. Stroud and Jordan Love look like budding superstars, unheralded playmakers have emerged around them, and the Texans and Packers both have a chance to punch their ticket to their conference championship games this weekend.
So, what went wrong in Carolina?
In a word, everything
Perhaps the most bizarre element of Carolina’s 2023 faceplant was that a run game that had been outstanding in the back half of 2022 was arguably the worst unit in the NFL in 2023.
Guard Austin Corbett never got on track after an offseason injury, but he was one of five on the offensive line; with running back Miles Sanders arriving as a supposed upgrade over D’Onta Foreman, the talent should have been close to a wash.
Unfortunately, like everything else about the Carolina offense, the run game was dead on arrival. A heralded “all-star” staff of coaches failed to find answers, and for all the problems around him, the quarterback failed to elevate the team around him. There are certainly bright spots in Bryce Young’s rookie film, but there are also far too many misses, often in crucial situations. This started in Week 1, when Young overthrew an open Mingo from a clean platform on what would have been a 99-yard TD to give the Panthers a seven-point fourth-quarter lead over the Falcons after Mingo TORCHED an Atlanta cornerback off the line, and it persisted until the end of the season.
So while Carolina’s situation looked similar to the aforementioned teams a year ago, the dice did not roll their way, and there’s no simple course correction. Whatever the positives of Bryce Young’s game, he is both short and slight by NFL standards, and his lack of arm talent relative to say, C.J. Stroud, puts a different ceiling on Young than Stroud. Similarly, if Ekwonu couldn’t get his pass protection issues ironed out during his first NFL offseason, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether it will ever happen.
The unfortunate truth is that poorly managed teams do not tend to find quick pivots; instead, they compound one mistake with another, accelerating the hiring/firing cycle on both the coaching and personnel front.
Given what they gave up to get Bryce Young - and whatever they told themselves about Young before they picked him - the Panthers are unlikely to point to him as the problem, and it’s hard to say where that leads. The best-case scenario would be the type of resurgence Tua Tagovailoa has enjoyed in Miami, but that required the additions of head coach Mike McDaniel and receiver Tyreek Hill to go along with receiver Jaylen Waddle. McDaniel is one of the more creative minds in the NFL - all coaches say they are going to build a system to the strengths of their players, but that's clearly easier said than done - and Hill is the most explosive receiver in the NFL, while Waddle is arguably the second most-explosive, which makes that formula difficult to duplicate.
In other words, short of a marked change in fortunes on both the coaching and player fronts, Carolina fans (and Bryce Young) could be in for another long season…or two.
Could Tepper Change?
That’s a tough one. NFL legend would tell you that, after his decision to step in on the Terry Glenn pick contributed to the rift between him and then-head coach Bill Parcells, Patriots owner Robert Kraft adjusted his approach, which created the environment for Bill Belichick to eventually build his program.
Setting aside whether that story is completely true, Tepper does not strike me as an individual on the verge of an epiphany. Losing it and tossing a drink at a fan is one thing, but issuing a statement/non-apology in which he blamed the fan hints at a worldview where it’s everyone else causing the problems.
The consensus is that Tepper is a very active owner, and so far, the results are atrocious. Carolina was the worst team in the NFL by a wide margin, their two recent top-10 picks are trending the wrong way, and to add insult to injury, they have to watch Chicago decide what to do with the first overall pick in a draft where the selection is even more coveted than it was a year ago.
The obvious thing to do would be to hand football operations over to a Sean Payton-type, who could get the team back on solid footing while taking a year to assess what should be done at quarterback. The problem is that there are seven jobs open right now and Carolina is the least desirable destination in every regard; with edge rusher Brian Burns set to hit free agency, they have the shakiest roster, the least resources, and by all appearances, the worst owner to work under.
That doesn’t point to Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson or Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh, two of the top offensive-minded head coaches in this cycle, falling over themselves to take the Carolina job. Given his background, Harbaugh better fits the Sean Payton comparison, but it’s also unclear whether an established coach would (1) sign up to work under Tepper and (2) actually get whatever buy-in Tepper promises in that process.
I don’t think that all of the coaches and players who saw their careers die in Washington under Daniel Snyder - many of whom had success elsewhere in the NFL - came to that end in a vacuum. The NFL is a difficult enough league to compete in under the best of circumstances, and I can’t think of the coach or personnel executive who praised an owner for having a meddlesome, micro-managing approach; it’s always the opposite, the football ops side praising the owners who create an environment for them to do their jobs.
It’s a bummer of a note to start this series off on (I promise to bring significantly more optimism in the Washington breakdown!), and as someone who liked the Panthers as a “dark-horse” division winner going into 2023, I wish I had a more optimistic outlook, but 2023 did not happen by accident. The right hires at general manager and head coach could change all that…but given the owner’s hiring record for those positions, I’m not holding my breath.
Early 2024 Projection: 4th in NFC South