Dundon or Tepper: Which speaks to winning?

Eric Frederick writes for The Assembly, and it's an absolute, it's a brand, I mean, as far as I know, it was sent to me by a friend. As a matter of fact, you've heard this friend host this radio show, Hayes Permar, forwarded me this article. You can find the website, theassemblync.com, and there was an article written, and we're almost two months removed from it, but I think it is still relevant because David Tepper and Tom Dundon still both own their respective teams, and the article is entitled, Why the Canes are Hot and the Panthers are Not, in parentheses. And Eric Frederick joins us on the Adam Gold Show. Can I boil it down simply to the fact that the Canes are winning and the Panthers are not? You could if you wanted to, Adam, it's your show. My, like you said, I wrote this for The Assembly, and I wrote it as a freelancer, and The Assembly does long form journalism about power in place in North Carolina. Right. And they give the reporters a chance to dig in and do the, find the story that hasn't been told before.

So if I want, my mission here was not to tell the story of the intricacies of what these two teams are doing on the ice and on the field. Well, that I listened to Canes Corner with Adam Gold, or I'd read Luke and- Wow. What a plug. Thank you. What I wanted to do, and John Drescher, who is the contributing editor at The Assembly, reached out to me. And he used to be the editor of the News & Observer, right?

Yeah. He was my boss at the Internet. And he said, isn't it interesting what these two franchises have done the last five years since Dundon and Tepper came in? Let's lay them side by side and examine whether there's something at the CEO owner level that they're doing might explain some of it.

So I didn't want to do a Freudian analysis either, but I wanted to look at some of the things that they have done, how they fit things that they have done in the past, and see if we could find some clues there. So I was not given access to talk to either one of those guys. It was a busy time. Tepper was very busy hiring me. Good luck talking to David Tepper, busy or not.

I would argue that Tom Dundon is much more accessible. Much, much more. Yeah, Tepper started talking to the media when he first came in. Not much since then.

No. But he also, the Anton Walks tragedy really knocked that office for a loop. So it was kind of hard to report on them. But what I did was I talked to people who had been inside the organization, some of them who still are, let them go off the record on a couple of occasions because, you know, to get real insight.

Right. And I talked to some sports management experts and I did a lot as a baseline for this story. I did a lot of studying of quantitative measures of franchise success.

So a couple of things came out. They're very similar in some ways. They both came from honest backgrounds. They became billionaires, basically building on things that nobody else wanted. Like Dundon started by selling or making auto loans out of the back of an auto shop. Tepper buys things that nobody else wants and watches them take off.

That's his thing. They're both uber competitive. They're both unemotional in decisions that they make. You can ask Ron Francis or Ron Rivera about that.

But there are a lot of key differences between the two as well and some very interesting ones. Tepper is more of a guy who shoots for the moon. He is. I think the analogy I used in the story was that he's the guy who throws deep on first down.

Yes. And I didn't mean to say that he just takes risks for the sake of taking risks. He has often said, if you don't take risks, you don't win. But he does study what he does. He does his due diligence. Like he's not going to throw deep unless he's going to scan the defense. He's going to see if that play is going to work.

Dundon is more an analogy. He tends to the details. Tends to build things brick by brick, make sure every single piece is working and not shoot for the moon.

Kind of take it one step at a time. The analogy I used for him, he's a guy running the power play. He's not going to shoot. Maybe that explains it. I'm just kidding. This is the hockey joke I threw in there, Eric. I apologize. There you go.

Appreciate that. He's not going to take that shot that's going to get blocked on the way through and watch it go the other way. He's going to work around.

He's going to work for the high percentage shot and then take that. So that's one of the key differences between the two. One of the things I also thought was interesting, I was looking at him at some, you know, Forbes does profiles, business profiles of sports teams. Professional sports teams. And I was looking at those two and they tell you everything you want to know. Everything they spend for bubble gum. And I'm looking at the bottom of the Hurricanes page and there's this thing called win to player cost ratio.

And I said, well, that sounds interesting and it is exactly what you think it is. They, Forbes gives a score to every sports team in a league based on a ratio of how many wins they get for how much money they spend on their players. And the league average is 100. So if you're if you're right at the middle of the league, if you're the 16th or 17th team in the NHL, your score is around 100.

You're getting exactly what you expect for the money you're spending. The Canes score is 121 last year. So they're getting 21 percent more wins per player dollar than the average, which means if a team goes if a team gets five wins, the Canes spending the same amount of money gets six.

So I thought, OK, that's not really surprising. I kind of expect the Canes to be over achieving in a way. But then, OK, let me see what the Panthers are. The Panthers score is 59. That seems low.

It's low. What that means is if you're an NFL team that's five and five, if the Panthers are spending the same amount of money, they're going to be three and seven. Play that out over a season and see how it works out. Well, I mean, it speaks to I mean, hate to bring it back to the very beginning, but it absolutely simply speaks to winning. The process and Eric Frederick from the who wrote for the Assembly at the Assembly NC dot com.

And I'll tweet this article out after we're done having this conversation so people can actually read it. But their approach to building the team, you say that David Tepper is a, you know, go deep on first down. And I would argue that in his pursuit of a quarterback, that isn't the opposite of what he was doing, is that he was going he was trying to find a quarterback on the cheap. And because that those are the guys they went after. But it kind of fits his business model because he was buying assets that nobody else wanted anymore. And that's exactly what he did with quarterbacks. Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, except that I don't think the those assets appreciate quite like, you know, a company. No, they don't. And that's an interesting take, Adam.

But here's what I would say to that. If he was trying to get Sam Darnold on the cheap, Sam Darnold's agent saw him coming because he way overpaid for Sam Darnold. The thing that was weird about that deal was Sam Darnold had the option year. Sam Darnold had won 13 games with the Jets in three years. He had the option year before he had taken a single snap for the Panthers. They picked up that option year. It's like 16 million dollars. So he actually spent a lot more money for Sam Darnold than he was worth, which is against his business strategy.

That has worked so well for him all of his life. Baker Mayfield, yeah, he got him on the cheap. He got basically what he paid for. Matt Ruhl. Everybody wanted Matt Ruhl. It wasn't like that was a dumb decision necessarily on its face. It didn't work out so well, but he paid him. He signed him to he's never been a head coach in the league. He signed him to a seven year deal for 62 million dollars and the other owners were going crazy.

They're like, why are you raising the bar to this level for a guy who's never coached, never been a head coach in the league? That didn't work out so well. Yeah, and wasn't that good.

I mean, he was good in college, but it wasn't that good in college. How did these two guys do with fan service when when that has to be a part of it? Now, it's obviously fan service is good when you're winning and one of these franchises has won and the other really has not.

But does that play a role into this at all? Yeah. One of the big differences, the other big differences between these two guys was when they came in, Dundon had a very specific strategy for that. He said, we're going to do three things. We're going to do four things. Winning being the fourth, but the first because everything else is underpinned. Right.

Or winning underpins everything else. But we're going to take care of the fans. We're going to take care of the players.

We're going to make sure that they feel like a family here and that they're wanted here and they want to be here. And he always said, I'd rather be talked about than loved. So nobody talks about the hurricanes, not even in town, but in the NHL, around the NHL, nobody talks about hurricanes. There's no buzz around the Kings. Within a year, he's got Don Cherry foaming at the mouth about the Kings on.

Yeah. He ticked all those boxes, but he said, we're going to take care of the fans. We're going to make it. He did this.

He's done this all his life too with top golf. He said, this is going to be an experience that you're going to want to do again the next day. Fans are going to have fun. And if you're going to have fun at intermission, that's one thing, but losing sucks.

Let me, you know, we're going to build a winning team, so it's going to be fun to come to games. Yeah, he did. And he did all of those things pretty quickly and he made it clear to everybody in the organization. Those were his priorities. The one thing that Tom Dundon got right that David Tepper did not. And it leads to all of the other things is the head coach. And Tom and I have talked about what led him to Rod Brind'Amour.

But to me, that's the key to all of it. And David Tepper got. He decided he was going to have the shiny new toy, Matt Rule, when maybe Matt Rule wasn't the right guy. And he just jumped up, jumped out, even as as Tepper said, he carried his luggage right from the airport. Like, that's really nice. But that's how desperate he was for ultimately the wrong hire.

Tom Dundon got that element right. And the Hurricanes obviously are winning. So is there anything else you want to you want to tell us about this before we say goodbye?

Eric Frederick wrote for the Assembly, the Assembly NC dot com. Well, you touched on that when you mentioned the head coaches. There's been a lot more consistency and leadership in the front office and on the field with these two teams. The Panthers have had more quarterbacks.

They could have a five on five basketball game with the quarterbacks. They started games since Tepper has been there. Like you said, Brind'Amour, Bill Peters was here when done and got here. But you got here in the middle of season and he moved pretty quickly after that season. Got his guy who was in the office.

Yes. You know, Panthers fans will say, well, it's easy when Rod Brind'Amour is down the hall. But he knew he clicked with Rod Brind'Amour right away and he knew that was his guy. He's been the only coach. Panthers have had five head coaches. Well, I talked to a guy in the office who said he worked in the Panthers office. He said when Jerry Richardson was there, you knew where you could walk around with blinders on. You knew where everybody was and what they were doing right after Tepper had been there two or three years.

You're you walk in and you're like, I'm sorry, who are you? Right. There's no consistency at all. It's hard. I think people just assume these guys have billions. Two things about this. One, billionaires who make their money in other walks of life think that it's just sports and it's easy. It's not. And it takes a while to learn how to be an owner.

And just because you're like. In a way, Tom Dundon has a bad. She's going to say mentor about this, but I don't think there's been physical mentoring where he looks at Jerry Jones as a great owner.

I disagree. Jerry Jones is mocking the entire NFL establishment by thinking he can do it. But all these people have been trained in the sport and know more about football than Jerry Jones. It's sad that I mean, kind of amazing that the Cowboys have done as well as they have.

But of course, they haven't really won anything under Jerry Jones. Dundon is taking a little bit of that same angle at this and Carolina's hopefully going to matter. This year is going to be a little difficult because of injuries and whatnot.

But hopefully in the next year, Carolina will be really a Stanley Cup, a bonafide Stanley Cup contender. But it's hard when you're the owner and you think you know more than everybody else. And, you know, that's a good point. You know who Tepper's role model would be? The Rooney's.

Yeah, he's got great role models. Right. So go figure that when you have billions, you have all the answers. Eric Frederick, I hope that one day you have billions and buy a team and then hire me and we'll talk about this again. I appreciate your time. Eric Frederick from the Assembly NC dot com.

I will check. I will tweet this article out so people can check it out. It's comparing Tom Dundon and David Tepper. Also, I think this is interesting.

DT versus TD for for whatever that means. Eric, thank you so much. Thanks, Adam. It's great to be here.