Matt Rhule Interview

I am very delighted to speak with our next guest who I first met the day after Halloween in 2014. I was covering a ranked East Carolina team with Lincoln Reilly as the offensive coordinator at that time, and they were completely stymied on that miserable rainy day in Philadelphia. It was Temple's first ranked win in forever, and I was in the tunnel amid the celebration, and their coach was high-fiving everybody in sight, including this reporter watching on the periphery of that happy AL team. That man, of course, was Matt Ruhl, who is now the head coach of the Panthers and now joins us.

Coach, thank you for the time. I'd say quite a few things have happened between now and then. I appreciate that. That was a great day, though. That was a stunning upset for us. We were very proud. This is your first draft as a head coach that you just undertook, and I'm wondering, you guys had the test run around this time last week.

You get Brown in the first round, you move up on day two and take Chin for Southern Illinois. Just in terms of process and the experience of it, how did expectations meet reality for this virtual draft? You know, I thought it went way better than we ever could have expected.

I think all of us over the last couple months have learned a lot more about technology and how we can use it. I thought, if anything, it really allowed us to eliminate a lot of the chaos. You put 60 people in a room right before a draft, there could be a lot of opinions, a lot of things like that. This was really clean. You could hop back and forth from coaches to scouts to ownership to the general manager and myself. I thought we were able to really get a lot of people's opinions and do it quickly and do it really cleanly.

I thought it was really a good setup. Just as a fan of football, I enjoyed watching the draft and seeing all the kids at home with their families having their lives changed. Yeah, but here's what I heard, coach. I heard you kept your girls out of the office on night one and they got a little jealous seeing all the other little girls get on TV that night. What happened there? Yeah, my son ratted me out Saturday.

He's 15. He told me we weren't sure what it was going to be like. We knew we were picking seven and there's going to be all kinds of scenarios. So my wife promised the girls that she would let them get their ears pierced if they would just go to bed on Thursday night, which they did. I didn't hear a beat from them and then only to find out the next day that all these other coaches' kids were on the videos and in the pictures. So they came out in full force.

They went cheerleader outfits and pom-poms and the whole deal and they were panthered out. So I must have made a mistake the first night, so I tried to make up for it the second night. It's Panthers head coach Matt Rule with us here on Sports Hub Triad and I want to learn a little bit more about you. I've been doing some homework. You're the son of a Nazarene minister who upon reading some things about you, you apparently or he moved your family 35, 40 years ago from Kansas City to New York to take a job that I can't imagine paid that much. But whenever I talk to people of faith, men of faith, they always talk about calling that draws them to do so. What lessons of faith and calling did you learn from your dad as you approached football, which I'm sure there were some points you began to wonder why you were doing what you were doing? Yeah, I think the thing I learned from my parents both, they're both faith-based people, is that all of us have a purpose in life.

All of us have some sort of missionary purpose that we can choose to serve and you're given gifts, you're given you know, passions and desires that stimulates you and if you can find a way to take those gifts and passions and do them to serve others and serve the Lord, then that's your calling, that's your life's work. And so for me, you know, it's always been, I love the game of football, but I've really liked working with young people and helping people, you know, in their lives and consider myself a teacher in that regard. And so, you know, I had a chance to do it at the college level for a long, long time. You know, I went to Baylor at a time when people were shocked that I took that job, but, you know, I felt like it was a Baptist university that was in the middle of a terrible, terrible sexual assault scandal and I knew it was going to be hard, I knew it was going to be a very popular decision, I knew it was going to be a very easy job, but I felt like, you know, I was supposed to go there and get it fixed and get it turned around and headed in the right direction, which I think we did.

And so now, you know, for me, it's really no different. You know, I have a chance to be the head coach of the NFL team, that's pretty cool, but at the end of the day, I have a chance to work with a bunch of great people. I have a chance to work with a bunch of tremendous players, all of whom have different things going on in their lives and with their families. I have a chance to come and serve, you know, the Carolinas and serve two great states in any way that I can.

And so I think those are the lessons that I learned from my parents, knowing that it's never really easy, you know, you're going to have to do things that are hard, but it's what you're supposed to do. Recently, I had a chance to connect with your former head coach Kent Briggs at Western Carolina when you were there for a few years, and he described you as, quote, an army knife on his staff. And then I started looking at it, coach, you held four different positions in your four years at Western coaching both sides of the ball. What sticks out to you when you look back on your first coaching stint in North Carolina? Well, I loved my time at Western Carolina, you know, Coach Briggs was a great man.

You know, my wife and I had no kids at the time. You know, I'm a guy that grew up in New York City and, you know, had gone to Penn State and, you know, took this leap to come to Western Carolina, live in color North Carolina, which is a beautiful place. And I met some of the best people I could have ever met. You know, Jeff Collins, who's the head coach at Georgia Tech, was the defensive coordinator when I was there. A bunch of guys on that staff now have really prominent positions in college football.

And, you know, I just enjoyed it. And as a coach, you kind of hit it on the head, you know, at that time I had a chance to, you know, I coached the linebackers, I was the special teams coordinator, I was the assistant head coach, eventually became the O-line coach. You know, I just kind of took a bunch of different jobs and did what was needed. And I think that's really served me, you know, I've continued that trend, you know, I've been an offensive coordinator, I've been all these different things in my career. And, you know, I'm not certainly not a guru.

I'm not, you know, some, you know, play calling machine. What I am is a guy that's coached a lot of different positions that I hope is knowledgeable enough to affect players and talk to players and also knowledgeable enough to make sure the football is good to talk to coaches, to develop coaches, and see it from all perspectives. And so a lot of that really started at Western and started under Coach Briggs.

And for that, I'm extremely grateful. It's Panthers head coach Matt Ruhl with us here on Sports Hub Triad. So once upon a time, as you kind of noted, you were at Penn State, you were coached by Joe Paterno.

And when you were in the NFL for your brief stint, you were under Super Bowl champion Tom Coughlin. So now that you've cut your teeth as a coach, and you've seen what works for you, being the head of a program and now the head of an organization, what's a specific way you've identified that those men have influenced the kind of coach you are? Well, you know, they did it in different ways, and they're both different than me. But I think the biggest thing is that they both had a vision and a philosophy and a way that they wanted to do things.

And that didn't change. You know, one of the reasons why a lot of people aren't successful is that they kind of flutter in the wind and they try to do what's popular. They try to do what's new and they try to do what's cool, and they don't stand for something. And Tom Coughlin and Joe Paterno as football coaches both very much stood for something, and they were very demanding, highly disciplined. You know, sometimes people would think that they had great personalities and tremendous charisma and great people skills and tremendous relationships. But at the end of the day, they stood for something and they demanded what they wanted. And I think that's something that I learned is, A, to have great relationships with the people that you coach, the people that you work with.

But at the same time, you know, you have to demand excellence, you have to demand a process, you have to be disciplined in your approach first and then demand discipline from everyone else. And I couldn't have learned better from anyone else. Being that you're the head coach of Charlotte's NFL team, have you had a chance to speak with Michael Jordan since taking the job? No, no, I haven't. I've been watching the documentary The Last Dance, and I've certainly enjoyed watching that. But no, I've had a chance to exchange text here and there with Coach Borrego, who's been really, really cool welcoming me to town. But I look forward to meeting Mr. Jordan at some point.

So you've watched The Last Dance. We're going to have Roy Williams with us tomorrow. We had Jay Billis earlier talking about MJ. So I'm interested, as a head coach who's been around people who are certainly just so driven to be successful.

What comes to mind when you see the level of drive and commitment MJ had in his playing days? And heck, it still seems like he has many of those same traits. Yeah, it just goes back to what I said about Tom and about Coach Paterno. He didn't really care if he was liked. We hear so many kids nowadays say, hey, I'm a lead by example guy.

I don't believe in that. Lead by example just means that you do your job, means you're a great teammate. Leaders inspire and or demand others to do more than they're doing.

And you saw on the last episode, they lost the Pistons twice in a row, two years in a row. Instead of going on vacation, he didn't tweet a lot. He didn't put out an Instagram post. He didn't do an interview.

He got to work and he demanded that his teammates get to work. Life changes and things change, but the secrets to success don't really change. It's not what you say. It's not what you put out there. It's what you do. And no one worked harder. No one practiced harder. No one demanded more of himself and more of the people around him than Michael Jordan.

And it's pretty cool to see that because there's so many parallels to what I'm doing and what so many other people are doing day in and day out. Coach, I was just reminded that when I was at Duke Carolina and Chapel Hill this year, that classic double overtime game in February, I remember seeing that you and Joe Brady were at a Hornets basketball game. So I wonder how much interest you have in hoops and if there are any games around here you'd like to see on your sports bucket list? Yeah, you know, my sister went to Duke and my parents and my parents are big Duke fans.

So there's been a couple times I've had actually Duke Carolina tickets and I've never been able to actually get to the game. Coach! I would love to go see it. I would love to go see that at some point. You know, it's kind of hard in football, you know, your schedule and stuff, but even that night, you know, at halftime we went in and we were watching the end of the first regulation, you know, and the free throw and all the things that happened. So, you know, I love basketball.

I grew up a Knicks fan, but, you know, like I'm a huge Dell Curry fan. I mean, there's things that I want to do and see. And so I'm excited to really get immersed, not just in Charlotte sports, but in all of sports all across North and South Carolina.

I mean, I think there's so many great things to see that I'd like to do. One more football thing before we let you go. We are being joined by Matt Ruhle, the head coach of the Carolina Panthers. I'm looking at your offseason as a whole, and man, it seems you have fostered a roster or put together a roster where there's just going to be competition everywhere.

It doesn't look like there's a lot being given to anybody in the way of long-term deals. And I'm looking at it, your free agents, 11 of the 14 I've counted, free agent acquisitions on offense, they have two-year contracts with the exception of Teddy Bridgewater, and they're all in their 20s. Defensively, you pick the entire draft defensive players, first team to do that, all seven picks on defense in the draft. So how much of that is part of the plan when you're trying to build this thing in year one, getting a young roster together, knowing that it was bound to be young when Luke Keakley retires and you move off of Cam and Greg Olsen, how much were you thinking, let's get a bunch of young people and allow for them to compete in order to see who the best guys are to build around? Well, I just think it's kind of, I don't think I came into it saying, hey, let's do that. But I think as you get here and you see there was a bunch of really good players on defense last year that were entering their early 30s and mid to late 30s at some positions, and you only have so much really salary cap.

And so you're trying to position it where, hey, what can we do to be healthy long-term? And I like the thought of bringing in a free agent and giving them a two-year opportunity to show what he can do. I mean, it allows you, or even a one-year deal, it gives you a chance to really get to know that player. They're still young, see what they can do, see if their best days are ahead of them. It gave us a chance to draft guys and really mold them.

And so you're right. I think we have, aside from our specialists, I think in terms of the offense and defense, I think we only have three guys over 30. And so we are a young team. While there is a lot of experience, you have guys like Shaq Thompson, who's 26, who's played a lot of football. While we do have some experience, we do have a really young team. And football rosters change every year, but you want to have a core group of guys that you can grow with and can grow together and just keep feeding young players into that. And I think Marty's done a really nice job this offseason. I think we have a shared vision of what we wanted. And we're going to continue this entire offseason all the way up through the season, keep trying to improve the roster constantly and making sure, as good coaching staff, we're doing a great job of coaching those players so that we can get the most out of what we have. Matt, really do appreciate you having you on here, the stories you told. Appreciate you sharing those. And who knows, in just a few months, hopefully things are back to normal. And I can give you a high five and actually mean it this time, unlike 2014, where you just didn't see me that. I look forward to it. Thank you, coach. That's Matt Ruhl, the head coach of the Carolina Panthers, kind enough to join us on Sports Hub Tryout.