During most of his tenure, we ran a Tampa 2 defense that flowed through Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis. It was catered to their strengths as they were both elite in pass defense as well as run. As Davis aged and ultimately was released, we shifted to a 3-4/46 hybrid this year with pretty disastrous results. We led the NFL in sacks for a big chunk of the season, but our run defense just completely and utterly fell apart. Part of that was due to personnel and injuries, but I would be very leery if Rivera tries to put his 2019 system in place again. If you look back through Rivera's career back to his days as a defensive coordinator though, he has experience running nearly every defensive scheme out there.

Offensively, he's about as hands-off as they come. He always gave enormous power to his coordinators: Chudzinski, Shula, Norv Turner. Whoever you all get as your offensive coordinator will be nearly as important as head coach. As a general philosophy though, Rivera was actually extremely conservative despite the Riverboat moniker. He started Riverboating when he realized he could just use Cam Newton as a battering ram to get a yard when needed. I wouldn't expect him to use Haskins the same way.

Rivera is excellent in the locker room and the only player I can ever remember saying something negative about him was Steve Smith who trashed everybody when he was cut here back in the day. He's fantastic at coming up with gameplans custom made to attack the opposition and won't just stay with one scheme and expect it to be successful no matter who he's playing. He doesn't put up with bullshit and his teams are disciplined and generally one of the least penalized in the league.

Despite all that, I was actually all in favor of him being fired. He will make you pull your hair out with his dumb decisions in-game. Even 9 years in, he still didn't really know when to throw the challenge flag or how to effectively use timeouts or how to execute a 2-minute drill. He gets the big things right, but he got the little things wrong. It became a running joke how he would just burn through his timeouts super early in halves leaving none when they actually mattered in late-game situations. He's about as anti-analytics as they come and almost seemed to relish his opportunity to go against whatever analytics said was best to do in a given situation. His poor choices during games were good for at least one loss per year. And his thing about discipline had its drawbacks too: he benched Cam for the first drive of a primetime game once when he didn't wear a tie on the team bus. That "drive" ended on one play when Derek Anderson threw a terrible pick. Brian Burns was absolutely crushing it for us as a rookie pass rusher this year until he said something questioning of Rivera postgame and its play time was reduced by literally 90% until Rivera was fired. It was clear that things had just become super stagnant here with him and a change was warranted.

Still...I think he's pretty clearly better than any coach you all have had in a long time. I would expect significant improvement, especially if you draft Chase Young. It's impossible not to like him, he's absolutely hilarious at times and is friendly with the media. Great family guy, great storyteller. I think it was the right thing for us to fire him, yet I think it's also the right thing for you to hire him.