Panthers owner David Tepper needs someone to tell him some hard truths. I’ll volunteer
Does anyone ever tell David Tepper what a cartoonish villain of a sports owner he has turned himself into?
Does anyone in the Carolina Panthers’ offices ever say, “Hey, Dave, that might be a little much. We’re about to try to hire America’s best head football coach, so could you please try not to look like a clown?”
Does anyone ever rein the man in, forget about all his billions for a while and just give him a crash course in human decency and how not to let your emotions get the best of you?
Obviously, they don’t. Or at least the ones who are left at Bank of America Stadium don’t.
As a former Panthers employee who worked for Tepper told me Sunday night: “Dave ran off all of the people who told him the truth.”
Now, thanks to another Tepper tantrum, in which he was caught on video Sunday afternoon apparently tossing the contents of a drink toward some fans in Jacksonville, the Panthers are once again the NFL’s laughingstock.
Welcome to Cup-Gate!
In what is the most humorous example yet of a word I recently coined to describe this type of behavior — “InTeptitude” — Tepper looked to have lost his temper late in the Panthers’ atrocious, 26-0 loss to Jacksonville. He appeared to toss the contents of his drink out of an open window in EverBank Stadium, from his suite toward some Jaguars fans.
Then Tepper threw the cup down with a flourish, like he was a swashbuckler sheathing his sword after slaying a dragon.
In reality, Tepper was acting like an entitled, immature man who can’t seem to think of the many ways this could have been handled differently. It was “InTeptitude” in its purest form, as Tepper ineptly botched yet another situation.
The Panthers declined comment Sunday night on the video. No apology. No explanation. Nothing.
The NFL said, through a spokesperson: “We are aware of the video and have no further comment at this time.” So stay tuned on that one. A possible precedent to ponder: In 2009, the NFL fined then-Tennessee owner Bud Adams $250,000 for obscene hand gestures when he flipped the bird — twice — at opposing fans. The punishment for “conduct detrimental to the league” came within 24 hours of the incident, as did an apology from Adams.
And in the meantime, while we await the NFL punishment and the late-night TV jokes, think of all the things Tepper could have done instead of throwing that drink and turning himself into a punchline. Such as:
▪ Shutting the suite’s windows, which sure look open in the sound-free video, if the Jacksonville fans below were bothering his game experience. No harm in that. He could have been completely insulated from the fans, had he chosen to be.
▪ Simply walking away from whatever was happening and telling his security folks to handle it.
▪ Counting to 10, taking a deep breath and not going with the middle-school approach to solving problems.
I feel like I’m writing a guide for beginning parents here, but instead I’m writing about a hedge fund manager who is the most significant and volatile person on the Charlotte sports scene. Tepper needs someone to tell him some hard truths. I’ll volunteer.
Tepper, 66, owns two of Charlotte’s three teams that compete at the highest level of their respective sports (he owns both the Panthers and Charlotte FC of Major League Soccer, but not the Charlotte Hornets.)
Tepper only arrived on the scene in 2018, when he bought the Panthers. He’s already blown through six head coaches (including interim head coaches) and is about to hire a seventh in January. He just hired his third Charlotte FC head coach, too, and the team hasn’t even started its third season.
Can it get worse? Yes it can
In other words, Tepper is not a patient man, although he begs to differ with that sentiment. But the facts show he’s prone to impetuous behavior outside of the financial world, where he remains revered because the scorecard there is mostly about money.
Tepper’s latest misstep came in a video that quickly went viral on New Year’s Eve, when the owner appeared to fling the contents of a drink toward a few fans in Jacksonville.
It didn’t hurt anybody. It was a small cup, it didn’t look full, the toss was underhand, and all it really did was enrage a couple of people who appeared to be Jacksonville fans and then started yelling up toward Tepper’s suite.
In terms of offenses, this ranks way down there, far below previous Panthers owner Jerry Richardson’s workplace misconduct scandal or at least a dozen things former Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder purportedly did.
But those things, by and large, were not on video and not viewed millions of times in a few hours. This one was, and so while extremely minor in the grand scheme of life, it is triply embarrassing. It is also no way to start 2024 for a Panthers team that just limped through 12 of the worst months in its history in 2023.
And let’s imagine this for a second: What would happen if a fan on Sunday had thrown a drink on Tepper and it had been caught on video? Where would that fan be right now?
During Tepper’s reign of five-plus years, there has been the Rock Hill training site fiasco, the various executives who have departed mysteriously, all the coaches hailed as saviors and then thrown out in the middle of their respective seasons, the NFL-worst 2-14 record this season, and on and on and on.
It’s not coincidence. It’s chaos.
And this was Tepper’s second outburst on the road in the past five weeks. On Nov. 26, a couple of reporters who cover the Panthers heard Tepper yell an expletive as he exited after visiting Carolina’s locker room in Tennessee following another Panthers loss.
Tepper fired head coach Frank Reich the next day, 11 games into a four-year contract.
I keep thinking it can’t get worse. Then it does get worse. The Panthers are 31-67 under Tepper, posting six straight losing seasons. And, at the least, Tepper needs to stop going to Panthers road games. The man runs hot on the road.
Tepper’s history in Charlotte
As you might know if you are a regular reader of this column, Tepper is giving me the silent treatment right now. The day after he fired Reich, in late November, he held a 14-minute news conference in which he and his PR folks froze me out of asking a single question, despite me sitting dead-center front row and waving my hand wildly and asking a question at every significant Panthers news conference over the past 30 years.
This came the day after I wrote that Tepper should fire himself.
So yes, we have some history, and we’ve never had any interaction after that particular press conference.
And yes, fans get angry at Tepper not only for running the Panthers’ fortunes into the ground, but also for acting as if he was the first person to introduce music to Charlotte, a Prometheus who brought guitars rather than fire to the masses.
And yes, Tepper does some very good things, too — bringing high school football to Bank of America Stadium, planting new soccer fields all over town, spreading around charitable donations and the like.
But let’s set all that aside right now. Let’s simply think about what happened Sunday in a vacuum.
A very rich man, in the sort of suite where rich men sit, got angry and apparently threw his drink out the window, toward some people who were quite literally below him.
It didn’t look good for Tepper, or the Panthers, or the NFL at large.
In a dozen different ways — both socially and football-wise — Tepper needs help.
I just don’t know who’s going to be able to convince him to accept it.
This story was originally published January 1, 2024 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Panthers owner David Tepper needs someone to tell him some hard truths. I’ll volunteer."
