The Panthers have no excuses not to win anymore. David Tepper has his guys in place.

When somebody new takes over a company, there’s always the question of who you keep and who you send away so you can bring in some of “your guys.”

Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper now has a roomful of “his guys” at the very top of the team’s organizational chart, with the latest being the team’s new general manager, Scott Fitterer.

Now we get to see what Tepper is really about from a football perspective.

Now we get to see if he really is going to develop a winner, after his first three Carolina teams as an owner went 17-31.

“Now there’s no place to hide,” Tepper said Friday in a press conference. “I never hide anyway, but for sure there’s no place now.”

The blunt billionaire has done a lot of good for the Panthers and the community since he bought the team from Jerry Richardson. Tepper is analytical, forward-thinking and doesn’t take himself too seriously — his enthusiastic Elvis imitation being but one example.

Tepper, 63, has streamlined a Panthers’ business operation that was behind the times. His civic-mindedness meant that Bank of America Stadium has been used both for early voting and, soon, as a COVID-19 mass vaccination site. He found a way to get rid of that 13-foot-tall, white elephant Richardson statue. He brought an MLS expansion team to Charlotte. His charitable efforts have been laudable. And I have little doubt he will one day land another new stadium, one that will replace Bank of America but keep the Panthers and the MLS team in Charlotte.

What Tepper hasn’t done yet, though, is win.

He’s 2 1/2 years into his tenure as Carolina’s owner, and winning is the problem he hasn’t solved — it is the stubborn stock that just won’t rise. The NFL playoffs are in full throttle right now. The Panthers are watching them on TV, as usual, just as they have been ever since Tepper bought the team.

With Fitterer’s hiring, Tepper has now replaced the two most important members of every NFL team’s football brain trust — the head coach and the general manager — over the past 12 months. So there won’t be any more of the “Well he inherited these guys and so he had to deal with it” vein of thinking. That’s gone. If it was an excuse, it is no excuse now.

“Some people criticize me for maybe not making changes initially,” Tepper said when I asked him during the Zoom conference about the significance of having hired both coach Matt Rhule and Fitterer over the past year. “Some people criticize me when they thought I got rid of (former head coach Ron) Rivera too early. ... So at this point, I really do think that while people always held me responsible before, and I never hid from that, there’s just a higher level of: ‘You know, these are the guys that I chose.’ ”

In other words, if Tepper has messed this up, we’ll all know it. And if he’s hit back-to-back home runs, we’ll all know that, too.

Tepper did try really hard to get this one right. Time will tell on whether he did. Anyone who immediately says “That’s a great hire” or “That’s a terrible hire” about a GM has no actual idea whether she or he is correct. But there’s no doubt the Carolina owner put in the work. Tepper likes research. He has gut feelings, but he wants data to back them up.

While hiring Rhule was done at rabbit speed a year ago, in part because the Baylor coach was such a highly sought commodity, hiring Fitterer was more tortoise-like in nature.

The Panthers interviewed 15 GM candidates — two in-house and 13 external — and used those interviews both to find the right guy and also as an exploratory mission to figure out some of what other teams do in their own front offices (a common NFL practice when big-time jobs open). The number of interviews, though, was so high that it drew notice around the NFL.

Said Rhule Friday: “I had someone say to me in the business, ‘Hey, a lot of people are kind of making fun of you guys for doing that.’ But I thought it was brilliant. For a first-year NFL head coach and a third-year NFL owner to be able to talk to 15 people about how they do everything? I mean, I would have paid for it.”

All that talking was a lot of work, and Tepper wasn’t farming out all these interviews to HR or some head-hunting firm. “His stamina for this was impressive,” Rhule said of Tepper.

Fitterer described Tepper’s questions as “probing” and said that while he enjoyed the process, his first interview with the owner was a significant challenge.

“We had a Zoom interview on Monday morning,” Fitterer said, “and it was intense. It was not a lot of football at that point. It was more about the (salary) cap. Analytics. He really pushed me to my limits to figure out what I knew and what I didn’t know. And it was a really intense conversation, really thought-provoking, a lot of probing questions. I really enjoyed it. And then I hung up, and I wasn’t sure how it went. You sit back and you think: ‘What happened there?’ ”

What happened there indeed? We’ve all had a conversation like that. Obviously, this time, it worked out. What this doesn’t mean though, apparently, is that Tepper is going to do a Jerry Jones imitation and start deciding who he wants to eventually be the Panthers’ new quarterback.

“Listen, I’ll never be close to the evaluator that Scott (Fitterer) or Matt Rhule is,” Tepper said. “And I won’t try to be that. But I am somebody who has some idea of how things should be run. And that’s where I think my greatest strengths will be.”

We’ll see. One of Tepper’s strengths is hiring good people at the top. It’s part of why he became a self-made billionaire.

But he needs to have hit on this Fitterer hire, much like I think he did hit on Rhule.

Because at some point, there really is no place to hide anymore.

This team has to win.