CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ NFL head coaches don't often hold a goodbye news conference the day after they get fired, but Ron Rivera was not your typical NFL head coach.
He was nicer, for one thing. More down to earth. If you met him, you liked him quickly and respected him more every year you were around him. He was always the same guy, a rock of stability.
And he won a lot. I've covered all 25 years of Panthers football, and Rivera was the best coach in Panthers history. And he'll be a good coach for someone else before long.
"My intent is to coach again _ I love coaching," Rivera said during his 30-minute news conference Wednesday morning.
Did he want a break first?
"I've got four weeks off, OK?" Rivera, 57, said, getting a laugh during what wasn't as somber a press conference as you might expect.
As for getting fired by owner David Tepper with a month still left in the season, Rivera said: "I was surprised. If anything, I thought it would happen at the end of the season, to be honest with you."
Rivera's firing from the job he has held since 2011 has made for a strange 24 hours in the Panthers' world. Tepper choked up while describing Rivera's virtues Tuesday. But Tepper fired the coach anyway, after watching Carolina go 12-16 in the 28 games since Tepper bought the franchise for $2.275 billion in 2018.
"Sometimes you just have to bring in fresh blood to change the culture," Tepper said Tuesday, "because it can't be done otherwise."
Rivera, who interviewed for eight previous NFL coaching jobs before he got the one with the Panthers, nearly got fired after the 2012 season by then-team owner Jerry Richardson.
Instead, Rivera survived and went on to coach nearly seven more seasons for Carolina. He picked up the nickname "Riverboat Ron" when he started going for it on fourth down well before the current analytics craze. His house literally caught on fire, leaving him to experience Southern hospitality in all its neighborly glory. He coached Cam Newton to an NFL Most Valuable Player Award and Luke Kuechly to an NFL Defensive MVP Award. He started saying the word "y'all" and picked up a hint of a Southern twang. He wore T-shirts advocating various charitable causes to dozens of news conferences.
And he used the words "missed opportunities" a lot _ so much so that he brought two final T-shirts to display in his final news conference, and the first one had the words "Missed Opportunities" emblazoned on it. It was a joke at his own expense, which was fitting because Rivera liked those kinds of laughs best of all.
Ron Rivera on coaching again: "Absolutely!"
Rivera won NFL Coach of the Year awards in 2013 and 2015. But he said Wednesday that the best coaching job he did was actually in 2014, when the Panthers started 3-8-1 but made the playoffs after winning four straight games, and then won a playoff game, too. He said his "biggest regret" was that the Panthers lost Super Bowl 50, to Denver.
