Marty Hurney, the Carolina Panther’s once-and-again general manager, represents a lot of different things to a lot of different Panthers fans. He is a spectre of seasons past bringing nightmares of cap troubles and poor drafts. He is a guarantee for drafting 10 year All-Pro’s in the first round each and every year - that is, each and every year he has a first round pick. He is the height of a conservative franchise refusing to part stick from mud. The truth of Hurney’s hiring is that he is and was all of those things. He can also be much more. Hurney has had plenty of mistakes to learn from and plenty of time to reflect on them.
I am not going to wring my hands and worry about his hiring being a signal of Jerry Richardson’s continued stewardship of a franchise he has publicly stepped away from. We’ll have plenty of time to worry about that after Richardson fails to find a suitable candidate to buy the Panthers, if that is, indeed, his intention. That is, for now, a worst case conspiracy theory that is just banana pants crazy. For Hurney, that means we, as fans, don’t need to worry about his simply being a ‘yes man’ for an owner that wants some insulation from the press and public. We simply get to take Hurney’s actions and statements from his freshman term as Panthers general manager as a simple set of facts and set them against his statements and actions during his sophomore term as Panthers general manager and draw our conclusions from there.
So far, we have had very few actual actions as the Panthers general manager to by which to judge his return. Yesterday’s roster moves, headlined by the releases of Charles Johnson and Kurt Coleman, are among the first real moves Hurney has made in 2018. Most of his exposure to the public has been through interviews in which he has repeatedly mentioned the lessons he learned from his failures in the past.
“I look back at some of the mistakes, it might have been that loyalty, the emotional part of my brain – and that’s when I’ve got in trouble in my life. I have a big mouth sometimes,” he said. “When the emotional part of my brain takes over, that’s not good a lot of times.”
The story of the Panthers under Hurney again has the opportunity to be one of redemption and success. He was best at retaining talent and building a team around what he had and what his coach wanted. Each of those facets could be taken to a fault at times. We have beaten the whys and the wherefores of his failures to death here over the years and we are all watching with bated breath to see how he handles aging veterans and the draft going forward.
Yesterday’s release of Johnson and Coleman are not moves we would have necessarily expected from the first iteration of Hurney. Both players, whether due to injury or age, saw their performances on the field decline over the past two seasons. Releasing them for most teams, would have been obvious moves. Under the old Hurney, however, the relationships there, particularly with Charles Johnson, would have just as likely led to a contract restructure that pushed significant dead money down the road as their release, which saved almost $6 million. Is this an older and wiser Hurney or were these moves too obvious to not make? I can’t answer that. I can tell you where to look going forward: Jonathan Stewart represents another old friend whose position on this team is less clear than Coleman or Johnson’s were. He is not young and often not healthy. His contract, on the other hand, is certainly very healthy. Stewart may have a role to play in Norv Turner’s offense and he may not. We don’t know yet. Hurney’s first big test will be how he manages Stewart’s contract as the team moves forward.
This team is not incredibly dissimilar from the Panthers that Hurney left, the Panthers that he spent his career building. His original teams saw mixed success built to the specifications of a coach who was so old school he probably still buys his bread unsliced. Hurney hired Ron Rivera to be a slightly less old school coach who would run a similar team. ‘Similar’ is likely going to be the watchword of Hurney’s second tenure. He isn’t going to make radically different decisions to what we were used to with him, he is just going to try to apply his same philosophies towards better results.
The NFL has long been a league of paradoxes. Coaches get recycled time and again. Some prove that they need the experiences, the mistakes, to learn how to be great coaches. Others catch lightning in a bottle. Others, still, are Jeff Fisher. Yet, with little regard to their successes, having been a head coach at any point seems to be the most important item on a resume when trying to be a head coach. The same is rarely true for general managers, which is just downright silly.
Coaches make decisions over the course of games that lead to mistakes from which they should be able to recover within game or seasons. Think of how Riverboat Ron turned a single Panthers season around. General Managers make decisions over the course of seasons, of drafts, that echo for years. The time it takes to learn and improve - and the opportunities to do so - should be commensurate.
Even the best have needed time to fail and recover. Bill Belichick didn’t become the bane of the NFL until after he failed in Cleveland. Hurney likely won’t rise to the same heights as Belichek, but if one of the greatest coaches and managers of all time needed the opportunity to try again then why should we expect anything less from the rest of the league’s management?