Taylor Moton first got the alert from the Carolina Panthers app on his cell phone at 1:21 p.m. Dec. 5.
It read: “Panthers part ways with Joe Brady.”
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A few hours earlier, in a somewhat surprising move, Panthers coach Matt Rhule met with Brady in his office on that Sunday morning and told him that he was out of a job. The meeting was cordial, Rhule said. Brady shook his hand, they talked some more and the meeting ended in a hug.
The move came as a surprise to many players within the organization, Moton included. Most players found out through social media. Quarterback P.J. Walker said he was at home with his fiance when she showed him the post.
“Just me knowing Joe, I felt for him for sure because I know the work he put in,” Walker said. “I know how good of a play-caller he is. Some things just don’t work out.”
Wide receiver Robby Anderson, who has expressed frustration on the field this season, said the same.
“I was surprised, but it’s a business and you have to expect the unexpected. But I was honestly a little surprised with us still being in the hunt and working towards the playoffs,” Anderson said. “And then it abruptly happened.”
Others in the organization were not as surprised.
This season, the Panthers have struggled offensively. Neither their running game nor their passing game has been able to operate at a consistent level.
The Observer interviewed nine players and league sources to help understand how Brady went from wunderkind to unemployed. None of them noticed anything amiss between Brady and Rhule. They got along fine. It was the production on the field that caused Rhule to part ways with the young, up-and-coming coordinator with five games left in the season.
Rhule frequently proclaimed after losses that the Panthers needed to run the football more. They often failed to do that because they were playing from behind.
And the passing game, for which Rhule hired Brady, also struggled. Only two NFL teams — the Chicago Bears and the Houston Texans — have passed for fewer yards than the Panthers this season.
This is why the Joe Brady experiment didn’t work.
A disconnect between Matt Rhule and Joe Brady
Diante Lee, an analyst for Pro Football Focus, questions how much of an alignment there ever was between Rhule and Brady. Rhule liked running the football, and that isn’t Brady’s philosophy.
Lee described Brady’s scheme as a spread offense with elements of the air raid. He referred to the Panthers’ Week 11 performance against Washington as an example that encapsulated what Brady wanted to accomplish with Cam Newton at quarterback.
Newton lived in shotgun while Brady schemed one-on-one matchups for DJ Moore and Christian McCaffrey, who both scored touchdowns. Newton threw just six incompletions that afternoon in Charlotte and Carolina had a chance to win at the end but turned it over on downs.
Then things went south the next week in Miami. Lee said Dolphins coach Brian Flores is an expert at attacking protections on obvious passing situations. Miami bombarded Newton with 28 pressures and six sacks. Carolina lost by three scores and Rhule fired Brady seven days later.
“If there’s something that you can probably place on the shoulders of a Joe Brady, it’s not necessarily having the best plan to protect their quarterbacks, given the fact that they’ve been taking on a lot of pressure,” Lee said. “(But) if you’re not good in the trenches, you’re not going to be good period. And they have not been good in the trenches under Rhule.”
Without at least average offensive line play, accurately evaluating an offense proves nearly impossible. ESPN’s pass-block win rate metric measures the rate linemen sustain their blocks for 2.5 seconds or longer. Carolina ranks 28th in that category.
Rhule said the reason he fired Brady was “purely football.”
Offensively, the Panthers have scored 18 third-quarter points in 12 games this season. That’s the fewest in the NFL.
Brady never had an answer as to why teams continued to stop his offense, and why the offense couldn’t figure out how to make adjustments each week. Teams didn’t respect the Panthers’ passing game. For all Brady’s reputation as a pass game guru, the Panthers haven’t thrown for at least 200 yards since Week 6.
Additionally, the fact Brady had no answers to how teams had the blueprint to stopping the Panthers frustrated Rhule, one source said.
Attempts to reach Brady were unsuccessful.
“If we’re being honest, there’s a formula that people try to follow to beat us,” Rhule said on Nov. 29, the day after the Miami loss. “They have to do a couple of things. Really, it’s stop the run and get after the passer for us.”
That wasn’t supposed to be the case.
Brady was a splashy hire made by Rhule shortly after he became the Panthers’ head coach in January 2020. Unlike many of the coaches Rhule brought with him to Charlotte, including defensive coordinator Phil Snow and running backs coach Jeff Nixon, he and Brady, who was 30 at the time, had never worked together. Their only connection was that they shared the same agent, Trace Armstrong.
But Rhule wanted to be bold and be aggressive. Brady was the youngest offensive coordinator in the NFL at the time and had a pass-heavy background. He got his first NFL experience as an offensive assistant in New Orleans under Sean Payton, working directly with Drew Brees.
From there he became the passing game coordinator at LSU, where he was responsible for talking to quarterback Joe Burrow after drives to go over what to improve. He also called plays in the red zone, on third down and other packages.
But he didn’t call all the plays, or even most of them.
LSU won the national championship Jan. 13, 2020, and Brady helped the Tigers set offensive records in just one season with the team. The Tigers led the FBS in completion percentage (75.1%), total offense (568.5 yards per game) and points per game (48.4) and were second in passing yards per game (401.6) and first downs (418).
Burrow won the Heisman Trophy and was drafted first overall that April. Brady won the Broyles Award, given to the top assistant coach in college football.
He was a hot name in coaching searches and viewed as the next Sean McVay, the Rams’ head coach who took over in Los Angeles at age 30.
“I thought Joe was gonna be really creative in the passing game,” Rhule said. “He brought a lot of stuff from the Saints that I really liked.”
The failed Teddy Bridgewater experiment
One of the first tasks of the new coaching staff was to figure out what to do at quarterback. The Panthers had Cam Newton on the roster, who had one year left on his contract, but he was coming off a Lisfranc injury. He had also two shoulder surgeries in the past two seasons, and there were questions about his long-term health.
The Panthers attempted to trade Newton but got no takers, so they released him and looked for a free agent quarterback as his replacement.
Teddy Bridgewater was one of those options and the Panthers eventually signed him to a three-year, $63 million deal in March 2020.
Brady was heavily involved in helping bring Bridgewater to Carolina, a league source said. Bridgewater and Brady spent time together with the Saints when Brady was an assistant there and Bridgewater was the backup to Brees. The two worked together regularly, traded notes, studied the offense and worked on game plans in New Orleans.
Bridgewater knew how to run Brady’s offense.
In Brady’s first season, 2020, the Panthers saw some statistical success. Four players — Robby Anderson, DJ Moore, Curtis Samuel and Mike Davis — had 1,000 or more yards from scrimmage.
But they struggled running the football (83 yards per game) and scoring inside the 20s (50.9% red-zone touchdown percentage).
Their top playmaker, Christian McCaffrey, missed 13 of 16 games and the Panthers finished 21st in the league in total offense.
And the Bridgewater experiment didn’t work.
He was 0-8 on potential game-winning drives. Fans wanted him gone after the team finished 5-11. And the coaching staff had lost faith in him, too. The Panthers traded him away to the Denver Broncos for a sixth-round pick, and are still paying part of his salary.
In May, Bridgewater said on the “All Things Covered” podcast that, “for Joe Brady’s growth, I think that organization will have to practice different things in different ways. ... Like one of the things we didn’t do much of when I was there, we didn’t practice two-minute, really. We didn’t practice red zone.”
Brady had no comment on Bridgewater’s quotes when asked. Rhule defended the Panthers’ approach.
Panthers didn’t run enough
Brady brought to Carolina a pass-happy offense.
Rhule, on the other hand, wanted the Panthers to be a running team. He often publicly said he wanted his team to run the ball 30-33 times a game.
But there were seven games this season when the Panthers failed to do that.
The Panthers are 4-1 this season when they run the ball at least 30 times per game and 1-6 when they don’t reach that mark.
In the Week 6 loss to the Vikings, the Panthers ran it 23 times and then-quarterback Sam Darnold, who was struggling, threw it 41 times. After the game, Rhule vowed that the Panthers would run the ball more.
But that didn’t happen in the 25-3 loss to the Giants the next week, and things reached a boiling point.
The Panthers abandoned the run before they needed to while the game was still close, rushing 17 times and throwing 39. The loss to the Giants was Carolina’s worst of the season and the second consecutive game the team did not run the ball enough.
“When things happen like this, they fall right on my shoulders,” Rhule said. “I have not gotten that done. If we don’t become a tough team soon, then we have to make some serious changes.”
Rhule was critical of his coaches. He said he didn’t feel a sense of urgency from his team and put it on the coaches and himself. The following week against the Falcons, Brady apparently got the message.
The Panthers ran it a season-high 47 times for 203 yards and won, 19-13.
But the Panthers were never able to find consistency in the running game, often placing too much in the hands of Darnold, who turned the ball over 11 times in Weeks 4-9; Carolina went 1-5 over that stretch.
The Panthers brought back Newton on Nov. 11 after Darnold injured his shoulder. And while Newton played well in his first two games with the Panthers — the first as a backup, the second as the starter — they still were unable to find consistency.
Then the offense had one of its worst games two weeks ago against the Dolphins. Newton finished 5-for-21 passing for 92 yards and two interceptions and the Panthers lost 33-10. Their run-to-pass ratio was 18-31.
“Miami did exactly what I told you guys they were going to do,” Rhule said on Nov. 29. “They lined up in zero blitz, they put everybody up at the line and they dared us to beat it. We beat it one time for a big play to DJ (Moore), but obviously did not beat it enough to run them out of it.”
Rhule was asked after the game whether he still supported Brady’s play-calling.
“I don’t even know that I’ve always defended him,” Rhule replied. “I’ve said we need to run the ball more. I always looked at it very even keel. I’m not going to be super inflammatory like everyone wants me to be.”
Rhule later said he came away from the game with “some feelings,” presumably about parting ways with Brady. But he wanted to watch film on the offense before deciding.
The following week — the bye week — Rhule did so. It assured him that he needed to make a change.
The Panthers entered their Week 13 bye ranked 28th in the league in yards per game, 23rd in points per game.
What the Panthers can learn from the Brady experiment
Philosophically, Lee, the PFF analyst, compares the Panthers’ offense under Brady to Arizona, Washington or Philadelphia. The Cardinals and Eagles have rushing quarterbacks, which usually flips the math in favor of the running game. Newton can still move but isn’t nearly as dynamic as his younger self.
Meanwhile, Washington has one of the best offensive lines in football. Without an advantage up front (the Panthers are 26th in ESPN’s run-win rate) or a math-flipping quarterback, the Panthers may not be best suited to run the ball as much as Rhule wants.
Those circumstances put a lot of pressure on Brady’s play calling. Lee said the best offenses have multiple answers for how they are defended.
“Carolina is kind of caught in this place where when they can do the one or two things that they really like to do,” Lee said. “It looks great offensively, but when a defense is able to get pressure on them, take away the run game, it does not leave very many answers outside of some of the things that Joe Brady likes offensively.”
Said Rhule of the decision to part ways with Brady: It’s not any one thing, it’s kind of the vision of how we think we need to play and where we need to be moving forward. We want to be a team that can run the football. Obviously, we can’t throw multiple interceptions, whatever we have to do, we have to do it at a higher level. It’s not one specific thing.”
Rhule handed over play-calling duties to senior offensive assistant coach Nixon, who served as his co-offensive coordinator at Baylor. The two have been friends since high school.
Nixon’s background aligns more with Rhule’s philosophy in running the ball.
What Brady’s firing also did was put all the players on notice. Moton said the NFL stands for “Not for long.” Other players reiterated that it signified that the NFL is a business and there is little loyalty.
Newton, who played arguably the worst game of his career against Miami, said it reinforced that he needed to play better.
“Because do I think I had something to do with it?” Newton said of Brady’s firing. “The competitor in me, absolutely, yes. Because the truth of the matter is, you don’t lose your job because of success. But where I’m at now, is doing what I can control to make sure I have a job, too.”
