Ron Rivera

“Riverboat Ron”, or Ronald Eugene Rivera, is the head coach of the National Football League’s Washington Commanders. Rivera was an All-American linebacker for the Golden Bears while he was a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1980s. He spent nine seasons with the Chicago Bears after graduating, including being a part of the 1985 squad that won the Super Bowl XX. He was selected by them in the second round of the 1984 NFL Draft.

In 1997, Rivera joined the Bears as a quality control coach, which marked the start of his coaching career. Two years later, he became the linebackers coach for the Philadelphia Eagles before returning to the Chicago Bears as their defensive coordinator in 2004. He assisted in coaching linebacker Brian Urlacher to win Defensive Player of the Year the next year, earning him the PFWA award for Assistant Coach of the Year. The club participated in Super Bowl XLI in 2006. He began working with the San Diego Chargers in 2007 as a linebackers coach before being elevated to defensive coordinator the following year.

In 2011, Rivera was hired as the Carolina Panthers’ head coach and would go on to become their all-time leader in victories. Additionally, he led the team to a spot in Super Bowl 50 and was named the NFL Coach of the Year in 2013 and 2015. Due to new ownership’s need for change, Rivera was sacked midway through the 2019 campaign. In the following year, he was named Washington’s head coach. He received a squamous cell carcinoma diagnosis that year, but by the beginning of 2021, doctors declared him cancer-free. He is the first coach in NFL history to have taken two teams with losing records (Carolina in 2014 and Washington in 2020) to the playoffs.