Dave Birkett

Detroit Free Press

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Dave Gettleman calls it his “blind date.”

The day after Gettleman was hired as Carolina Panthers general manager, the head coach that he inherited at his owner’s behest picked him up for a get-to-know-you breakfast at a local pancake joint.

For more than 2 hours, Gettleman and Ron Rivera traded football stories and talked about team-building philosophies as they sipped coffee, and when they shook hands and parted ways, the new GM made the old coach one promise.

“I told him we were going to be collaborative, I was going to get players, I was going to listen,” Gettleman recalled at Super Bowl media night Monday at the SAP Center. “I told him we needed to get bigger and stronger on the interior. And I told him I promised him I’d listen. Then at the end of the conversation, I looked at him, I said, ‘I’ll make you one promise and one promise only, that’s I’ll do everything I can to make this work.’”

Three years after owner Jerry Richardson arranged what could have been an uncomfortable marriage between Gettleman and Rivera, the Panthers are the toast of the NFL and a few days away from playing in their second Super Bowl.

They’ve won three straight division titles, have the league’s probable MVP and, in many ways, serve as a blueprint for what the Detroit Lions are trying to accomplish with Bob Quinn and Jim Caldwell.

Quinn, like Gettleman, came to the Lions in a GM search led by consultant Ernie Accorsi and inherited a coach in Caldwell with whom he had no previous relationship.

Quinn said at the Senior Bowl last week that he and Caldwell spent 10 to 12 hours over two days getting to know each other, and he ultimately decided to keep Caldwell as coach because they shared a similar vision for the Lions.

Quinn hopes to imitate Panthers in keeping coach

Gettleman had no say over Rivera’s future when he got the Panthers job. Richardson announced that his coach was returning before he hired a GM.

But coming off of a 15-1 regular season, Gettleman said the secret to their success together has been a working relationship rooted in trust.

“For Ron and I, none of it was difficult,” Gettleman said. “And I’m not just saying that. We haven’t had a cross word with each other yet. The biggest thing is it’s professional. And we listen to each other. He listens to me. He says something, I’m listening. I say something, he’s listening. And we respect each other’s ability to do our individual jobs. And it just works. We have a lot of the same philosophy. And we just get along.”

The Panthers of 2013 and the present-day Lions aren’t the only teams to pair a holdover coach with a new GM in recent years. The results have been mixed.

Washington made a similar decision after hiring Scot McCloughan as general manager last year and promptly made the playoffs this season. But the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets kept their coaches after recent GM changes, then overhauled things a season or two later.

Gettleman said he understands why most GMs make sweeping changes when they take over. There is a reason they’re being hired, after all.

But he said his years in the personnel department with the Buffalo Bills taught him an important lesson about evaluating everyone on their own merit.

“I see people come in and just blow things up,” Gettleman said. “Just think about it. You got somebody working for you, you fire them for whatever reason. You bring the next guy in, how long is it going to take you to train the next guy to get him caught up to the guy you just fired? It takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Well, now that time you took to get the next guy ready, you lost three, four, five, six months.

“They’ve done studies, when the economy goes down, some companies will lay off 150, 200 people. Now, when everything gears back up, they got to go hire 150 people. They might have been better off just saying, 'Everybody, listen, we got to cut your salary or we got to (work) four-day weeks,' something so that, when everything starts getting ramped up again, their force is ready to roll.”

Gettleman did make some philosophical changes in Carolina when he came aboard, especially in the way players are evaluated. But he also kept much of the Panthers’ personnel department in place. Assistant GM Brandon Beane, college scouting director Don Gregory and pro director Mark Koncz all are longtime employees of the organization.

Quinn has made more visible changes in Detroit, hiring several of his ex-New England Patriots colleagues to prominent front-office positions and firing a handful of the Lions’ longest-tenured staff members.

Rivera said continuity is a big part of the Panthers’ success, and he offered one piece of advice for teams such as the Lions that go through similar not-quite-wholesale changes.

“I think the biggest thing, more than anything else, is we communicated,” Rivera said. “We talked about things. We had open dialogue. He didn’t come in and blow things up. He came in and listened, and I think that was important. He talked, I talked. He listened, I listened. And we continue to do that. And at the end of the day, when we make a decision, it’s not because it’s his decision or my decision, it’s because we’ve gathered the information and, at the end of the day, we walk away feeling good about our decisions.”

Both Super Bowl coaches once interviewed with Lions

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

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