The Browns hired Panthers offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski to replaced the fired Pat Shurmur as their head coach.
That left the Panthers with an opening for an offensive coordinator and, in a twist worthy of a romantic comedy, they are interviewing Shurmur for the position on Monday. Joseph Person of the Charlotte Observer first reported the team’s interest in Shurmur last week and reported their meeting with Shurmur as well.
Person also reports that it is expected that the Panthers would ask Shurmur to seriously overhaul or scrap altogether the West Coast offense he’s run in other places because it is a bad fit for their personnel. That raises the question of why they’d be interested in hiring a coach whose experience is with an offense that doesn’t interest them, but we suppose there’s always a chance that Shurmur has secretly yearned to run a completely different scheme than the one that has taken him this far in his career.
That’s not the only news on the Panthers offensive coordinator interview front. As Albert Breer of the NFL Network reported over the weekend, that Bengals assistant Hue Jackson also interviewed with the team on Monday. Based on his past history running offenses, there wouldn’t seem to be the same need for Jackson to scrap his preferred scheme if he got the job.