What’s the point of having a cartoonishly rich financial titan as the owner of one’s favorite sports team? In some sports, it’s obvious. Steve Cohen is one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world, so he has more money than most of the garden-variety extremely rich dudes who own Major League Baseball teams. Cohen’s quest to spend the New York Mets all the way to a World Series hasn’t borne fruit yet, but it’s given the club a chance. The nice people behind a sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates have turned Manchester City into the greatest soccer club in the world. As a fan, in a sport where outspending the competition is well within the rules, having a motivated, extra-rich owner rocks.
The NFL is a trickier proposition, though. The league fetishizes parity. The worst teams get the best draft picks. The playoffs have ballooned to a size where almost everyone has a chance. Most of all, a salary cap flattens the financial playing field. An owner with more money than his peers can spend a lot of money on coaches or practice facilities, but he can’t splurge on all the best players, and therefore he can’t flip the competitive dynamic of the league. In fact, in a sport where an owner’s decisions necessarily have to go beyond just give the best guys the money, one could see how a certain kind of financial maven owning your team could become a real problem. A guy might have been so good at making money on Wall Street that he gets it into his head that he knows more than he really does. His financial heft might not mean anything in the rarified air he shares with other NFL owners, but he might be far enough up his own rectum that he thinks he has football’s secret sauce.
David Tepper owns the Carolina Panthers, the league’s worst team this year. Tepper is very good at reading a Bloomberg Terminal. His investment fund, Appaloosa, manages something like $14 billion in assets, and Tepper has done well enough with that money that he is worth at least $17.5 billion. His success in the financial arena yielded the opportunity to buy the Panthers in 2018 for a then-record $2.275 billion, making him one of the small handful of richest owners in a sport where everyone is rich. Tepper is not the most odious person to ever own an NFL team. Ex–Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder exists, after all. And Jerry Richardson, who sold the Panthers to Tepper shortly before his death, did so after paying a $2.75 million league fine for years of sexual harassment and racism in the workplace. The NFL can, and does, host more malign actors who are still in the league. But Tepper’s management of the Panthers is its own kind of spectacle because it reveals exactly what happens when a man with money drastically overestimates himself and sets a team ablaze with shocking efficiency.
The immediate problem is that the Panthers are terrible. The medium-term problem is that thanks to Tepper, they aren’t even terrible in the exciting, futuristic way that NFL teams are usually terrible. Ahead of last year’s draft, the Panthers held the event’s No. 9 overall pick. They traded that pick, very good wideout D.J. Moore, and three other draft picks (including this upcoming spring’s first-rounder) to the Chicago Bears to move up to the No. 1 slot. They did that with a specific player in mind: Alabama quarterback Bryce Young. It’s widely believed in football circles that it was Tepper, specifically, who drove the Young pick, even though Tepper has no relevant experience as a football evaluator. Tepper denies that characterization and says the Young pick was “a unanimous decision from the coaches and the scouts.” Really? Every single one of the dozens of evaluators in the Panthers’ organization thought the same guy should be the pick? Interesting. Anyway, Young has had a very bad rookie season and has gotten beaten up behind a lousy offensive line. The next player picked in the draft, Houston Texans QB C.J. Stroud, has put together a Pro Bowl–caliber season and looks absolutely certain to be the league’s next long-term franchise passer.
At any rate, the 2–14 Panthers have already clinched the league’s worst record heading into the final week of the season. But the No. 1 pick they’ve earned for themselves is now the property of the Bears. At best, Tepper hired football executives who appear to have no clue what they’re doing. At worst, he hired them and then declined to let them do their jobs effectively. Neither inspires confidence.
It might be useful, then, if the owner just sat back and let the football professionals do their work. But it’s not clear if Tepper is wired that way. Upon taking over the team, he hired Baylor head coach Matt Rhule out of the college ranks. Rhule had a pair of five-win seasons with a bad roster in his first two years, and Tepper fired him after a 1–4 start in his third year. Tepper has since tried to avoid paying Rhule’s full buyout, prompting an arbitration claim by Rhule. The dispute is over about $5 million, CBS Sports reported, an amount that Tepper cannot possibly care about. To replace Rhule, Tepper hired former Indianapolis Colts head coach Frank Reich this season. But he fired Reich after a 1–10 start. During that run of losing, Reich said at the time, Tepper had weekly meetings with his coach. Reich described their chats as diplomatically as possible, but he was clear that Tepper is a man with some passionate ideas about how his football team might get better on the field. Reich, who played quarterback in the NFL for more than a decade and had coached in it for 18 years, likely had his own better ideas. “There’s different philosophies in ownership,” Reich said. “Some owners kinda stay away and don’t engage a whole lot. Other owners do. And his philosophy is he’s gonna engage.”
Tepper’s latest engagement was with a fan sitting outside his luxury box during the Panthers’ loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday. Tepper threw a drink at one of the riffraff sitting below him, prompting a hilarious $300,000 fine this week from the NFL. (A $300,000 fine for someone worth $17 billion is akin to a $1.32 fine for someone with $75,000 in assets to their name. Such is discipline when the person levying the fine, commissioner Roger Goodell, is on Tepper’s payroll.) In a statement about the incident, Tepper did not apologize but did say “I am deeply passionate about this team and regret my behavior on Sunday.”
A good rule of thumb for human thought: If you are enough of an asshole to throw a drink at someone from an elevated luxury suite, you are likely not introspective about your interactions with others. Because of Richardson’s horrid behavior as Tepper’s predecessor, the bar that the Panthers owner needs to exceed in setting the team’s culture is sitting on the floor. He might be exceeding it, but not by as much as he should be. The Athletic reported in December that the Panthers’ building is rife with backstabbing and discord. Reporters said sources within the franchise compared the team’s culture to that of the Hunger Games.
That would all be a problem in any workplace, but Tepper’s issue is that his more effective qualities don’t matter much in the NFL. He’s got more money than most of his peers, yet he can’t meaningfully outspend them because of the salary cap. In the field where Tepper made his fortune, he could treat people however he wanted and still be wildly successful because of his expertise and financial advantage. In the NFL, he barely has a financial advantage and has no special expertise. But because he had enough money to put himself in charge, he’ll remain there until he decides he’d rather do something else (or until he goes off to run the great hedge fund in the sky). For now, the Panthers are stuck with him, and without hope.
