Matt Rhule’s identity as a college football coach was as a turnaround artist. In his first year at Temple, he went 2-10. Two years later he led the Owls to 10 wins and a top 20 ranking for the first time since 1979.
He was hired at Baylor to clean up the structural decay Art Briles left behind. He went 1-11 in his debut. Two years later, the Bears were a top 10 team and playing in the Sugar Bowl.
In 2020, he jumped to the NFL as David Tepper’s first head coaching hire as team owner of the Carolina Panthers. His first team in Charlotte went 5-11. Things never got better from there, and now he’s fired.
The #Panthers have fired Matt Rhule.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) October 10, 2022
Rhule’s 2022 got off to a 1-4 start capped by a 37-15 loss to the San Francisco 49ers that will long be heralded as one of the year’s least watchable games. The defense that had been asked to hold this franchise together for years finally caved. While those players told reporters they all had their coach’s back, their play on the field said otherwise. Tepper saw this, realized how poorly his investment was doing, and pulled the plug to get a head start on the other coaching searches sure to come in 2023.
Rhule’s tenure won’t be regarded as anything other than a disaster. That’s what paying $62 million for an 11-27 record will do to you.
But the once-rising college star never really had a fair shot in Charlotte because he was consistently forced to rely on retread quarterbacks who ranged from roughly average to truly hopeless. These are all the players who threw at least 20 passes for Rhule in the NFL, sorted by passer rating:
- Teddy Bridgewater, 92.1
- Sam Darnold, 71.9
- Baker Mayfield, 71.9
- Cam Newton, 64.4
- PJ Walker, 54.5
Brock Osweiler, for comparison, retired with a 78.0 passer rating. He would have been *significantly* better than 80 percent of the quarterbacks Rhule was forced to trot out in his two-plus seasons as an NFL coach. Since 2020, the Panthers rank 30th in offensive expected points added. Remove Bridgewater from the equation and they fall to 32nd, light years behind everyone else when it comes to the passing game:
The Panthers saw Rhule’s aptitude for turnarounds and hoped it would translate to other teams’ quarterback trash. What they got instead was Darnold playing like the league’s worst non-rookie in 2021 and Mayfield doing this through five games of 2022:
HE’S SO BAD HE NEARLY BROKE THE CHART.
Obviously Rhule shares the blame in being unable to squeeze more from an offense that features playmakers like Christian McCaffrey and DJ Moore. However, his front office rarely gave him a chance to make the offense his own rather than fitting it around another team’s rejects.
Rhule helped players like PJ Walker and Charlie Brewer reach their potential as college quarterbacks. The highest-drafted homegrown passer he got to work with in Carolina was 2022 third-rounder Matt Corral, who suffered a season-ending injury in the preseason. Otherwise, the other young QB prospect he inherited was Will Grier, who hasn’t thrown a regular season pass since 2019.
A revolving door of bad quarterbacks, all available via trade or free agency for a reason, left Rhule driving a Pontiac Aztek in a Formula 1 race. His defenses held on as long as they could, but when the dam broke against Jimmy Garoppolo — who, if Tepper does not learn his lesson, may be the team’s starting quarterback in 2023 — it was clear how hopeless the Panthers had become.
Rhule had to go. He’d proven himself a magician in stops at Temple and Baylor but the Panthers ensured he played to nothing but a crowd of skeptics in Carolina. His teams in Charlotte were perpetually doomed. While he’s culpable for that 11-27 record it’s fair to note that, yeah, he was also asked to perform exorcisms on irreversibly corrupted quarterbacks for the bulk of his time in the NFL.
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