One of the first things that Marty Hurney did after being named the interim General Manager of the Panthers was hold a meeting with coach Ron Rivera to get up to speed on the roster.
Rivera told Albert Breer of TheMMQB.com that “it was a great exercise” to dig into the players and hear the opinions of an “observer from the outside looking in” on the makeup of the team. It also fit with the overall theme of the offseason, which Rivera said is to evaluate what went wrong last season and not waste the opportunity to use it to make sure that this year is more successful.
“I have a friend who recently had a heart attack, and I called him and said, ‘I’m so sad that this happened to you,’” Rivera said. “And he said, ‘Ron, it’s not really what happened to me, it happened for me,’ basically telling me that he had to change, there are things he had to alter. Well, it’s the same thing for us. The way he put it to me made me realize 2016 didn’t happen to us, it happened for us. It was a humbling experience, and an experience to learn and grow from. And I feel really good that we’ve grown and learned from it.”
One thing that definitely won’t be the same as last season is the start. The Panthers opened in Denver last season in a rematch of Super Bowl 50 that wound up with the same unhappy result for the Panthers. Rivera wasn’t happy about that at the time and told Breer the loss “took a lot of the wind out of our sails.”
Rivera noted that the team could have gotten back on track from there and making sure that any setbacks don’t snowball this time around will be crucial to avoiding the same outcome this time around.