Rhule: Panthers practice plan looks like what we did at Baylor

[NAS]

Great read - full article posted below

https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/08/10/matt-rhule-carolina-panthers-college-experience-joey-bosa

MMQB: Matt Rhule Leaning on College Experience in Carolina

A quick ramp-up period with no preseason games is nothing new for the Panthers’ first-year coach. Plus, Joey Bosa’s contract was a milestone for his whole family, the Chiefs and Texans are getting closer to real football and the latest on opt-outs in the NFL and college.

Albert Breer

14 hours ago

Matt Rhule might’ve held the hot dog eating contest regardless. But the one he put on Friday—with the rookie linemen going head-to-head—definitely took on a different look than it would have otherwise.

For one, it was inside Bank of America Stadium, rather than at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. Also, everyone was distanced, and those not going Joey Chestnut on the food were wearing masks. And it went down before a single Panther had so much as buckled a chinstrap for a Rhule-run practice.

Because of all that, the team-building exercise took on a new level of importance, too.

“At a time when guys can’t even see each other’s faces, because we’re wearing the masks, getting to know each other’s personalities a little bit is fun. And it’s important,” Rhule said on Saturday, the players’ first day off of camp. “With no tryouts, and when you sign somebody it’s taking four or five days to get them in the building because of the testing protocols, it’s more like college, in that your team is kind of your team. You have to find out what people can do.”

On this day, Rhule found out the young defensive linemen could crush hot dogs faster than their offensive counterparts. In case you’re wondering, the coach’s fellow Penn Stater Yetur Gross-Matos was the star, and the defense got a trophy and the right to show up to work a little later on Sunday for the effort.

Moreover, it gave him another way where maybe he could use his experience the last seven years as a head coach in the college ranks to his advantage.

That’s important too, because he knows the score here. Most people look at the spot he and the NFL’s other four first-year coaches are in, and think, Those guys have no shot. And Rhule acknowledges that there are challenges he, Joe Judge, Kevin Stefanski, Ron Rivera and Mike McCarthy are facing now that are pretty unique to 2020.

“The hard things, you can identify them right away. We go out to the practice field and things as simple as, ‘Hey, here’s how we want to warm up.’; ‘Hey, here’s where I want you guys to stand’; ‘Here’s how we do this drill.’ We’re going through all that now—six weeks before the first game,” Rhule said. “That’s crazy. Those are things normally we would’ve done in May, and by now we’d have a really good feel for how we’d use our players, because we’d have worked with them. 

“We’re sitting here in August and I still haven’t a full-sheet drill with anybody on our defense or offense yet. That part is gonna be hard. Evaluating your roster, not just on who makes your roster but how to use them is gonna be really hard. That part’s legitimately a challenge.”

But here’s the thing: Where Rhule lacks NFL head-coaching experience, he can lap the field in the level of challenges he’s faced in running football programs. Which has given him a lot of experience in finding answers. 

On Friday, one was holding a hot dog eating contest. Over the next few weeks, he’ll need plenty more in just about everything he does.

We’re inching closer to real, live football practice—the Texans and Chiefs put on helmets on Sunday, becoming the first teams to do that en masse since K.C. and the Niners left the Hard Rock Stadium field six months ago. And that means actual football’s closer, which gives us a ton to get to in the MMQB. This week, we’re bringing:

• An inside look at how meaningful Joey Bosa’s contract was to the Bosa family.

• A window into the opt-out decision of high-end pass-rush prospect Greg Rousseau.

• The players’ view of how the early parts of camp have gone thus far.

And, of course, we’ll have our normal run of football-related notes. But we’re starting with Rhule and the Panthers, the challenges the coach has faced before—and how they serve him now.

***

Rhule arrived at Temple in 2013 to a down-trending program one year past moving from the MAC to the Big East (then renamed the AAC). He went to Baylor in 2017 and into something much worse—the program was coming out of a sexual-assault scandal, with players fleeing the program like rats off a sinking ship. And in both cases, Rhule told his staff, We’re going to roll with all these young players and live with their mistakes.

In both places, by the end of Year 1, a true freshman was starting at quarterback, and wins were hard to come by early on. Those Year 1 teams finished a combined 3–21.

“What we tried to do at both Temple and Baylor was to say, Hey, this is the way we’re gonna play,” Rhule said. “We refer to it as our brand. We wanted to establish our brand of football. So I look at it now, and I’m blessed in that on defense we have some guys who’ve played before in K.K. [Short] and Shaq Thompson and Tahir Whitehead and Tre [Boston] and Donte Jackson. But we’re also going to be counting on some young players—you have Jeremy Chinn, you have Derrick Brown. 

“It’s similar in that we drafted all these young players, and we’re gonna put them out there and play with them. And what’s most important is that they play the way we want to play forever, that we’re a physical, fast football team, that we establish what we stand for, our style, our brand.”

So if you want to know what Rhule will prioritize, and try to build in the limited time he’s getting with his players before the opener against the Raiders in five weeks, that’s it.

But more interesting to me in talking to Rhule was how he’d go about getting there. You might’ve heard Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury say a few weeks back that he believed his experience in college would help him in navigating the truncated 2020 schedule, and there’s a lot of logic behind that. College coaches have to work around the 20-hour rule, class schedules and absence of a preseason, among other things, to get their teams ready.

That, in Rhule’s case, is just the beginning of where his experience leading college programs should help. Which is why, in this weirdest of years, I figured he’d be the most interesting guy in the league to talk to about finding solutions, with the dog days of camp coming. And the conversation didn’t disappoint. Here’s where we took it …

Where the protocols create issues for other coaches, Rhule finds some normalcy. And this isn’t about the amount of days or weeks teams get, it’s more about the way their days will go. Within the time prescribed, coaches will have to allow for testing, for increased or more complicated foot traffic to and from different meetings/workouts—and many of the players will be coming and going from home, rather than all together from a hotel.

It’ll be nuts for some, not for the Panthers.

“This practice plan looks so much like what we did at Baylor,” Rhule said. “And the thing about Baylor is, last year, our guys were in classes, in summer school, for the first two weeks of camp. So, literally, I was scheduling meetings around classes. Now, you come in and there’s protocols and those things, and it’s like, ‘Well, I’m used to that.’ You have to do what you have to do. 

“This year, we couldn’t go away, we’re not all at one hotel. Well, we didn’t go away in college. Guys were living in their apartments. So from no preseason games to the scheduling challenges to all the things that come up in college, you just learn to say to yourself, Hey, what’s really, really important?”

Which goes back to the idea of establishing the brand.

And defining that brand may be more in execution, than diversity of scheme. Rhule wants his coaches to be realistic. Whatever the best laid plans were for the systems on offense or defense back in February or March probably aren’t realistic now. 

“The thing I always tell our guys, we can be complex, but we can’t be complicated,” Rhule said. “To me, it’s about the amount of things you can do. I never want to sacrifice the football part and make it simple. But at the same time, we can say, Instead of doing 10 things well, we’re gonna do five things really well this year, and as the year goes on maybe we can add six and seven. Coaches don’t like that, because they always like feeling like they have bullets in the gun—I can do this, this and this. 

“But players win games, so I want our players to be confident. We have five or six weeks to get our players confident.”

And he does believe his staff is positioned to do that. Remember, offensive coordinator Joe Brady took an LSU offense that had long been stepsister to that program’s defense, and broke all the records in a single year. Meanwhile, defensive coordinator Phil Snow was with Rhule at Temple and Baylor, where they got a steady stream of 18-year-old freshman on the field right away.

“Every year, we’ve had to start a true freshman on defense, who are literally coming out of high school, straight from the prom, and all of a sudden he’s starting for you,” Rhule said. “You want to be complex, you want to have all kinds of things. But you also want your players to be ready to play and play fast. So we’d love OTAs for those freshmen. But they had to be ready to go. So being in a position where we’re gonna play first-year players and draftees, that’s something, as college guys, [Brady and Snow are] used to.”

Camp will be taxing. Pro football players, and their coaches, are conditioned to have a difficult couple weeks of camp to start, with things getting broken up from there with preseason games. This year will be different in that regard, too. And the result is a world Rhule’s lived in for all but one year (when he was with the Giants in 2012) of his professional life.

“It’ll be a true training camp grind, just practice after practice after practice, with no game in sight,” Rhule said. “It’ll be like college that way, gotta put your head down and just wake up every morning, go to work, rest, go to bed, wake up the next day and do it all over again. Without having the breakup in the monotony, with the game, preseason games do break up the monotony of camp, this will be a mental and physical test for everybody.”

And there’s benefit in that, as Rhule sees it. Where they’ve been talking through internet connections, and around rules since March, everyone’s about to get to know the guy next to him really well over the coming weeks.

“Life happens through interactions. It happens by being around each other. A lot of that happens on the practice field,” he continued. “To me, we’ve got a couple really hard weeks ahead where we have to grind. But I do think we’ve made the most of a difficult situation, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about things that are important. One of the great things about our staff is we’re very relatable staff in that we’re talking to guys one-on-one all the time. To me, that’s how you build something.”

There’ll be less time to get hard answers on players. And that’s what Rhule emphasized above when he cited the challenge in sorting out roles and decisions on the roster. How do you make up for it? As the coach sees it, you have the players compete—over and over again. Even the hot dog eating competition had a winner and loser, and those sorts of situations are what Rhule pointed to when I asked him what he’s most looking forward to.

“Competition,” he said. “I love one-on-ones, I love seven-on-sevens, I love competition. To me, I love practice. I don’t love those long, drudgery, grinding practices, but I do love competitive practices. So just watching guys who’ve been blessed with talent go out there and compete against each other, and raise their standard of play, is something I love. I love to be a part of that, so knowing that’s right around the corner, to me, is really, really cool.”

***

Now, finding normalcy, as Rhule can tell you, isn’t the same as things being normal. This summer hasn’t been, and won’t be, and the reminders of that are pretty constant.

“The first time on the field, I went to explain the first walkthrough, where I wanted guys to go,” Rhule recalled. “And the guys walked up, and they’re in a circle around me, but socially distanced, and I’ve got a mask on and a Janet Jackson mic over the top of the mask, and I’m trying to talk. It was really hard to communicate when people can’t see your face. It was to the point where I had to laugh and make fun of myself wearing the mask, and then we moved on. 

“I would say that initial communication was probably the one time I was like, Wow, this is a little different.”

So maybe that isn’t why Carolina owner David Tepper went to the lengths he did to pry Rhule from the college game, and convince him not to interview with his hometown Giants in January. But Rhule’s ability to adjust and problem-solve is.

For the last six months, he’s shown that in spades. But everyone gets that this is just the start, and bumps are coming—especially the guys who were in Philly for 2-10 in 2013, and in Waco for 1-11 in 2017. The key, Rhule said, is he and his coaches continue to be “real honest” about where they are, both to themselves, and the players. And remember that if this all plays out as they plan for it to, down the line, these will become the good old days.

“When we went to the [AAC] championship game, and won the championship game at Temple, I would always tell our coaches, just remember we did our best coaching in the first year,” Rhule said. “And all the players that won a championship, they went through that first year. And then we went to Baylor, we were going through a tough first year, and I’d always tell our guys, Remember guys, we always talked about the first year at Temple, we never talked about the championship year—do your best coaching now. 

“And so that’s the approach I’ve tried to take. The ethos of the Carolina Panthers will be built now. This is an opportunity for us to completely define who we are and how we do things. … So my challenge to our coaches is, This is really challenging, make this your best coaching job. Look, we always look back, we always romanticize and talk about the early days and it was hard and we were finding a way to get it done.”

Rhule then said, with purpose, “Right now, it’s hard. Let’s find a way to get it done.”

And if that means wearing masks during a hot dog eating contest, so be it.

 

[GRWatcher]

An excellent article, thanks. Still, I can see us fielding the equivalent of an NFL college team in the first few games and rookies hitting rookie walls the last few games. Any winning will be in the middle of the season and it will surprise us all. Coaches being comfortable with the odd practices will only go so far. We lose any advantage from the college experience, if there truly is any, with the first game.

I'm most impressed with “But players win games, so I want our players to be confident.” But it needs to go beyond that. And establishing a brand, well, isn't that what all first year coaches want to do? Nothing new there. That brand had better include winning.

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56 minutes ago, GRWatcher said:

An excellent article, thanks. Still, I can see us fielding the equivalent of an NFL college team in the first few games and rookies hitting rookie walls the last few games. Any winning will be in the middle of the season and it will surprise us all. Coaches being comfortable with the odd practices will only go so far. We lose any advantage from the college experience, if there truly is any, with the first game.

I'm most impressed with “But players win games, so I want our players to be confident.” But it needs to go beyond that. And establishing a brand, well, isn't that what all first year coaches want to do? Nothing new there. That brand had better include winning.

Agreed. I think mentality goes a long way but it can only take you so far. Talent is missing especially on defense. You can’t scheme your way out of it. 

But I am excited about setting the culture of sustained excellence and maximizing potential of your roster. 

[Mister]

Grab your nuts panther fans and Let’s get behind this team!! Way to early for negative comments let’s see what rhule is all about 

[RumHam]

if this offense can't score points and keep the ball, there's a problem. When Eli Apple says everyone is fast, it just makes me think he's that slow.

[PanthersGTI]

All very good things to hear. I like that there is a focus on finding out what players can do and working from there, I believe it can make the team that much more dynamic and will hopefully let talent rise rather then a vet being handed a position because 2 years ago he played great. Its also very nice to hear the coaching staff a) being required to be flexible and b) being held accountable.

I think if we see some glimmers out of this defense this year, especially in the secondary,  it will be the sign we need that we have the right coaching staff in place.

[Carl Spackler]

My goal is just to not surpass the 1976–77 Bucs for longest losing streak of all time. If we go 0-16, we’re gonna be pushing it. So a couple wins and the top pick would be great. 

I like what Rhule has to say in this interview. Idk if it’ll be successful or not, but his approach is a good one.  

[Mage]

2 hours ago, RumHam said:

if this offense can't score points and keep the ball, there's a problem. When Eli Apple says everyone is fast, it just makes me think he's that slow.

What else would he say?

[TheSpecialJuan]

very nice

[PanthersGTI]

It's also nice to have something work for us rather than to our disadvantage which most this weird off season/camp has been. 

[shaqattaq]

I have to admit that the coaching Staff changes are what I' most excited about this off season. Tepper did whatever it took to land the top college coaches in Rhule and Brady. I have a feeling that Snow's hire was a condition of Rhule's, but after watching an interview with him, he seems legit. I realize that we don't have the players this year to load up on wins, but I have a good feeling that August 2022 will be a whole different conversation.

[hepcat]

Rhule certainly says all the right things. He's a great talker and motivator. I just hope his style translates to NFL success.

[TheSpecialJuan]

39 minutes ago, hepcat said:

Rhule certainly says all the right things. He's a great talker and motivator. I just hope his style translates to NFL success.

[Paa Langfart]

I am still not convinced a real season of football lies ahead this year,but I am already looking forward to next year and the year after.