1. IT’S NOT COMPLETELY NEW [gap size=”10px”]

Panthers head coach Ron Rivera was flipping through channels late at night a couple weeks ago when he landed on a black-and-white film.“Knute Rockne, All American” tells the story of the former Notre Dame coach who helped popularize the forward pass and other ‘open offense’ concepts. While Rivera watched the biopic that was released in 1940, he recognized much of what today’s ‘creative’ offenses are running.”The game hasn’t changed. When you watch that stuff from way back when, you see bubble screens, you see the forward pass, you see the zone reads,” Rivera said.”People want to talk about all the innovation that’s going on throughout the league. Shoot, you go back and look at the tape, there’s not a lot of new things being invented. These things have been done before. It’s the history of the game.”Rivera saw an opportunity for a teaching moment, so he asked the Panthers’ video department to edit together clips from the Rockne film with similar plays being run these days. Rivera then showed the mashup to his players. His point — teams like the Eagles, who many assume are reinventing the game, aren’t.“They’re not doing anything different than when football started being played to now,” Panthers cornerback Josh Norman said. “Same ball, same premise. Only thing different is the pace.”