In Kansas City, they hire airplanes to drag banners through the skies.
In Charlotte, the cool kids buy full-page ads in the newspaper.
After Panthers center Ryan Kalil got the ball rolling with his Super Bowl promise earlier this year (whoops), a fan or group of fans bought another piece of newsprint real estate in the Charlotte Observer this morning to blast Panthers owner Jerry Richardson.
Signed by the “Perturbed Panthers PSL Owners Federation” (which might be 1,000 fans or might be two guys in tin-foil hats, we don’t know because there are no names attached to it), the single-spaced screed which includes charts and graphs takes Richardson to task for what it calls “The Panthers Pyramid Scheme.”
Their central complaint seems to be that Richardson continues to make money while the team continues to not win.
I’m checking with Florio to see if that’s actionable in North Carolina, and with friends in Cleveland to see if they’ve stopped laughing yet.
Buried within the avalanche of words are some salient points and a few funny lines (of coach Ron Rivera: “His clock management would be a mystery even to the Swiss”). But mainly, it comes off as a really long message board post, or call to a sports talk station.
They railed on former general manager Marty Hurney, who has already been fired. They railed on Rivera, who probably will join him soon.
Mostly, they railed.
Hopefully, with all that off their chest, they feel better.
And if nothing else, it guarantees that many of my old friends at the newspaper will get paid for another week, so they’ve got that going for them. Which is nice.