As the NFL season comes down the stretch, we will also see the business of football start to ramp up toward the usual offseason activities. Today we’ll look at one team that fired a coach and one team that has not been able to field a starting-caliber quarterback.
Carolina blue
There was a time in the NFL when it was unheard of to fire a head coach after one season on the job. Now that happens, it seems, annually. But a head coach firing before the end of his first season seems over the top. Yet that just happened for the third straight year. Last season the Broncos fired Nathaniel Hackett after 15 games. Even Urban Meyer, a train wreck with the 2021 Jaguars, lasted 13. But Carolina coach Frank Reich got to only 11 games before being dismissed by Panthers owner David Tepper last week.
Thirteen months ago, Tepper fired Matt Rhule barely three years into a seven-year deal, with $40 million left on his contract. Now Reich has been fired in the first year of a four-year deal, with roughly $30 million left on his contract. Tepper has now put both of them into my Business of Football Hall of Fame.
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Some have suggested Tepper is a meddlesome owner in the mold of Jerry Jones, albeit without the experience in the NFL. Others have likened him to now former Commanders owner Daniel Snyder with his lack of awareness. While those comparisons are fine, I liken him much more closely to another NFL owner. He is this decade’s version of Browns owner Jimmy Haslam.
Haslam’s early tenure in the NFL was defined by a slew of hirings and firings, spending away until he (hopefully) got it right. Haslam fired multiple coaches (including Pat Shurmur, Rob Chudzinski, Mike Pettine and Hue Jackson), as well as front office executives (among them Joe Banner, Michael Lombardi, Ray Farmer, Sashi Brown and John Dorsey) while content to pay out tens of millions of dollars after their terminations. Similarly, Tepper will soon hire his seventh head coach, including interim coaches, since buying the team in 2018. Tepper also shared Haslam’s yearning for Deshaun Watson, a sweepstakes in which Tepper lost out to Cleveland’s exuberant contract offer.
Tepper oversaw—some have said engineered—a franchise-defining trade to acquire last year’s No. 1 pick, quarterback Bryce Young. While it is way too early to make judgments on Young’s career, the early returns have not been good. Young is small in stature, which can be justified by some truly special skill, such as Kyler Murray’s speed and escapability, or a strong arm, but he has neither of those. His major asset out of Alabama was performing at his best in the biggest spots; that has not translated with the Panthers.
To acquire the right to draft Young, Tepper sold off the team’s top receiver (DJ Moore), the No. 9 pick in the 2023 draft (which became Jalen Carter, the league’s top defensive rookie) and its ’24 first-round pick, which could be the top pick and a quarterback better than Young. This is the kind of trade package offered up for a perennial All-Pro player, not an undersized quarterback who has never played pro football.
Tepper will keep hiring and firing, as the Panthers are a bad team without a first-round pick and not likely an attractive free-agent destination. Sure, they can build and take a long-term approach, but it doesn’t seem like Tepper has the patience for that. He comes from a different world where money can buy success right away, damn the consequences. And there has been no success and lots of consequences.
These are some Carolina blue times.
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Aaron Rodgers and the Jets
The Jets and their fans had so much hope upon the trade acquisition of Aaron Rodgers; it changed the narrative of their team and their outlook on the season in such positive ways. I did laugh when Rodgers, at his initial press conference, said, “I’m not here to be a savior.” Of course he was there to be a savior.
That savior sustained a serious injury four plays into his career in New York. I feel for Jets fans, some who are friends texted me that night with things like, We can’t have nice things and, We had him for four plays! As my former colleague with the Packers Ted Thompson used to always say: “Injuries are the bane of our existence.”
The Jets’ record of 4–8 actually masks how bad this team has been (and their upset of the Eagles is the most head-scratching result of the season). Despite a couple of ascending young players on offense, Breece Hall and Garrett Wilson, even with those two, their offense has been historically bad. They are woeful to watch, a team truly incapable of scoring points.
The Jets’ 2023 season will of course be remembered as the one when the team put all of its chips on the table for Rodgers. Even though that “quick fix” mentality is certainly not in the DNA of the team I worked with in Green Bay, I understood the move. Even at his advanced age, acquiring Rodgers injected hope and optimism in a franchise sorely in need of it. And as readers of this space know, I’ve been an unabashed fan of Aaron’s since meeting him the day after we picked him in the first round of the ’05 draft (and taken some criticism for being so). We were close from ’05 to ’08—in his first three years with the Packers, my last three—and although we have communicated sparsely since, Aaron brought my family (still diehard Packer fans) tremendous enjoyment for 15 years.
It is one thing to acquire a superstar like Rodgers. It is quite another, though, to allow him greater influence. Perhaps Rodgers or the Jets would argue that they would have signed Allen Lazard for $44 million, or Randall Cobb and Tim Boyle, or offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett (signed before the trade for Rodgers but integral to the courtship) without him. Please. Cobb and Lazard were healthy inactive players last week against the Dolphins, and Boyle was benched Sunday in favor of Trevor Siemian. The resources spent on these signings could have been used on players not in Rodgers’s orbit who may have better helped the team.
Injuries happen in football, I get it. But NFL teams separate themselves with their pipeline of players ready to step up in preparation for the inevitable injuries that occur. Rodgers was acquired as a 39-year-old with some history of calf injuries.
The Jets’ sum of preparation for the loss of Rodgers, both before and after his injury, was to rely on the player they were so desperate to replace: Zach Wilson. Wilson clearly has not shown an ability to lead an NFL team since being drafted No. 2 in 2021. Being drafted at such a lofty position gave him enough leverage to be secure in a backup role, but he has clearly not displayed an ability to be an NFL starting quarterback (and then there were reports about whether he wanted to play again). It is hard to believe the Jets could not have found a more playable quarterback from the time of Rodgers’s injury in early September until now. Heck, Business of Sports’ Hall of Famer Joe Flacco came off the couch to throw for 250 yards and two touchdowns Sunday for the Browns!
As for the Packers, now surging with the youngest roster in the NFL, I said repeatedly that they were the quiet winners of that trade. Again, they secured two second-round picks—the one in the upcoming draft should be in the top 40—and offloaded $100 million (now $75 million) for a player (1) whom they have replaced with an ascending young talent in Jordan Love, and (2) who was never going to play for them again. And they are playing well with the cheapest group of quarterbacks, tight ends and receivers in the NFL, by far. To put it in perspective, the Packers’ seven receivers are making a combined $7.5 million this year; Lazard is making $12 million for the Jets.
The Packers are not blameless in their handling of Rodgers, however. Despite some lingering tension between them and their longtime quarterback, they went all in for 2022 on a contract that, while they were able to offload to the Jets, left behind a $40 million cap hole. They are maneuvering around that hole with that young roster, but the contract was quite curious.
Aaron may play this year; I get it that he wants to regardless of the Jets’ fading playoff chances. And he’ll probably play next year, when $37 million guaranteed awaits him. The Jets should welcome his return. But the Jets need to address many positions, including backup quarterback. This year’s plan was all about Aaron, and, due to injury, the plan failed. Next year it has to be about more, much more, than one player.
