The partnership between Marty Hurney and Ron Rivera has been 10 years in the making

Before the meeting, Hurney told Panthers president and coaching-search partner Danny Morrison about how he had been impressed with Rivera’s presence the first time they met. Not long after, with the three of them seated at a table in a hotel suite, Morrison understood why. It was an intense, six-hour interview, but Morrison remembered Rivera was engaging and well-prepared — and when Hurney asked Rivera about his football philosophy, it became obvious that “there was chemistry between the two.”

“We see football the same way,” Rivera said in a recent interview. “We’re a little bit of a throwback from the old days compared to how things are evolving very quickly right now. And I still think you win football games by being a physical football team, playing downhill, running the ball successfully, stopping the run, pressuring the quarterback.”

Ten Januarys later, Rivera and Hurney traded places. The Washington Football Team coach was sitting across from Hurney in Northern Virginia, interviewing him for a job. They had worked together in Carolina for five years (2011-12 and 2017-19), but after an ownership change and underperformance, the Panthers had fired them in consecutive seasons. Now, at the start of the second year of his effort to turn Washington into a winner, Rivera hired his old comrade as the team’s executive vice president of football and player personnel.

This setup, though, is not Carolina Part 2. During a recent virtual news conference, the team’s top trio — Rivera, Hurney and General Manager Martin Mayhew, who was hired at the same time as Hurney — preached collaboration. Mayhew and Hurney are expected to be behind the scenes in the coach-centric model led by Rivera, whom owner Daniel Snyder called the organization’s “one voice” when he hired him last year.

Mayhew is the face of the personnel department, and he and Hurney will lead as de facto co-GMs. Mayhew is expected to assume more in-house responsibilities, such as the salary cap and contract negotiations, while Hurney, 65, will spend more time on the road scouting. The two will form a brain trust with senior vice president of football administration Rob Rogers to provide counsel for Rivera and make recommendations.

“The only thing that matters to either one of us is to win games,” Hurney said last week while sitting beside Mayhew during the news conference. “That’s all it’s about. Having people that you really like personally, and you respect professionally, and you can have fun with and work extremely hard — I think that’s the ideal situation. That’s the way I view this.”

On March 12, 2020, as NFL teams began to pull their scouting staffs off the road because of the coronavirus pandemic, Hurney traveled to Oregon’s pro day and was the only NFL GM to attend quarterback Justin Herbert’s workout. Hurney’s decision embodied his belief that there’s no substitute for in-person evaluation. To Rivera, it “epitomizes who Marty is.”

“Marty’s a road GM,” Rivera said. “He doesn’t like to be in the office. He wants to be out there, the touchy-feely type of guy [who likes] to see things.”

That Hurney and Rivera are kindred spirits might seem odd at first. One of the only obvious overlaps between the globe-trotting Army brat (Rivera) and the middle-class suburbanite from Wheaton, Md., (Hurney) was that each had three brothers. In the mid-1970s, Rivera became a star high school athlete in Southern California as Hurney grappled with the limits of his ability as an undersized guard on the club football team at Catholic University.

Yet they both shared an obsession with football. In college, coach Joe Pascale remembered Hurney — about 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds — as a decent player whose brain outpaced his body. Hurney would grill coaches to understand his role. Once, Pascale recalled while laughing, Hurney argued about blocking technique with assistant coach Ralph Sonntag, a former Maryland lineman who was named the ACC’s best blocker in 1969.

After his sophomore year, Hurney stopped playing to focus on the Tower, the student newspaper. He was the sports editor and sometimes wrote about his old team’s games.

“He was interested in how you build things, how you get it together and be successful,” Pascale said. He chuckled remembering Hurney’s questions and adopted a young, high-pitched voice. “ ‘Who’s the QB? How’s the offense look? What’s the most important position you have to fill next year?’ ”

After graduation, Hurney became a reporter. He ascended to the NFL beat at the Washington Times, and one colleague later wrote that Hurney’s “prose had the lyrical quality of a Gatling gun, but he could find news.”

In 1988, Hurney left journalism for a job in Washington’s public relations department, working alongside GM Bobby Beathard and Coach Joe Gibbs. Two years later, Beathard left for San Diego and took Hurney with him. Hurney handled the scouting department, player contracts and football administration, and Rivera believes Beathard helped instill the “old-school” principles that he and Hurney share.

In 2002, Carolina named Hurney its GM. That offseason, the front office was split on young free agent quarterback Jake Delhomme, and Hurney applied what he had learned from Beathard and Gibbs about talking through major decisions until they reached a consensus.

“There were some reservations,” director of pro scouting Mark Koncz told the Rock Hill (S.C.) Herald a few years later. “But Marty got everybody on the same page. We discussed it and discussed it, and by the time we made a final decision, everybody was there together.”

The next year, Delhomme led the Panthers to the Super Bowl. Now, Rivera believes such bridge-building will be crucial. He explained that, if a front-office debate ends without consensus, someone will say something they shouldn’t to another team, an agent or the media.

“One thing I appreciate about Marty,” he said, “is that Marty wants to be on the same page.”

In the beginning of the Hurney-Rivera partnership, it was all sunshine. The Panthers improved in Rivera’s first season to finish 6-10 with rookie of the year quarterback Cam Newton. Team staffers noticed the coach and GM got along well, often chatting before meetings and sitting together on the road.

“[The culture they fostered] made a huge difference coming to work every day,” longtime video director Mark Hobbs said. “It’s a grind, but if you’ve got an environment where everyone’s on the same page, you just work that much harder. … I just wanted to win for Marty and for Ron.”

This sentiment arose because Rivera and Hurney are similar not only in how they see the schematics of football, said J.C. Glick, a retired Army ranger and former Panthers consultant, but in that they put people first.

“It’s an outcomes-based business,” Glick added, “but [they understand] outcomes are only possible with people.”

Hurney also drew admiration for his ability to evaluate players. Morrison, the team president, remembered watching the first draft after he was hired and being impressed by the front office’s discipline to its board. He noticed Hurney often hit on prospects whom the Panthers had rated higher than other teams. This included linebacker Luke Kuechly, who, as Morrison noted, was not an obvious pick at No. 9 overall in 2012 because the Panthers were deep at the position.

But one of Hurney’s traits that his co-workers loved — loyalty — also got him in trouble. He overpaid players he had drafted, which hamstrung the roster and contributed to the team’s disappointing start in 2012. By October of that year the Panthers were 1-5, the worst record in the NFC, and owner Jerry Richardson fired Hurney.

In 2015, Rivera and Hurney’s replacement, Dave Gettleman, built one of the best teams of the decade as the Panthers went 15-1 and lost to the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. But two years later, in a surprising move days before the team started training camp, Richardson fired Gettleman and rehired Hurney. He was, for the first time, reunited with Rivera.

“It was almost like nothing changed,” Hobbs said. “It was almost like [Hurney had] never been gone.”

Three years later, after the Panthers backslid and fired Rivera, the coach called up his old friend. They found themselves rehashing decisions they had made in their five years together. The reason Rivera said he hired Hurney in Washington wasn’t only because of familiarity. It was also because, in discussing their mistakes, they were aligned on what they should have done differently.

For example, Rivera said the Panthers didn’t re-sign defensive tackle Star Lotulelei in 2018 in part because statistics indicated he wasn’t worth the $10 million per year Buffalo gave him. But the next season, Rivera saw Kuechly, the linebacker, slip from his all-pro level of play without Lotulelei lined up in front of him.

“When you watch the tape, he’s running for his life because there’s nobody keeping him clean,” Rivera said. “There’s nobody keeping that guard-center combination from working to the next level to cut Luke off. That’s the thing that you sit there and go, ‘Oh.’ ”

Now, in the third phase of their partnership, Rivera and Hurney must avoid previous mistakes. They must incorporate Mayhew, an important new voice with a wealth of experience of his own, and actualize the collaboration they emphasized.

In that first news conference, a reporter asked what the key was for Washington to become a winning franchise again. After Mayhew finished his answer, Hurney did in public what the trio said has been happening in private — and what will need to happen every day if this revamped front office is to succeed.

“I agree with Martin,” Hurney said. “That’s what it starts with: the right kind of people.”