Cam newton carolina panthers5/31/2023 Those are all the questions the Panthers must answer. But can he regain that level? At what point do the injuries sap him of the skill and will that made him such a menace? And if he’s only 75 to 80% of the player he has been in the past, is that worth $19m a year? Would a new coach even want him? At his best Newton, who is still only 30, is one of the game’s most dynamic playmakers at the most important position in the sport. He is expected to recover by March, when his future will likely be decided.Ĭarolina have an intriguing decision to make. He has missed almost all of this season with a combination of shoulder and foot problems, and it was confirmed on Wednesday that Newton will have surgery on his injured foot. He struggled through 2018 with a nagging shoulder injury that forced him to train away from the team throughout weekly practices. Injuries robbed Newton of a good slice of his peak years. Newton even left a car wreck with his trademark smile. We hadn’t seen anything like the Cam show at quarterback before, and everything he did was for show. Newton hit a weird vortex: he was underappreciated by some and over-praised by those who saw some of the criticism for what it was: racial bias. But a lot of what was bubbling beneath the surface was obvious even to the most racially sheltered. Some of that was the generational gap between the old and the new. He should spend less time thinking about fashion and more about football. Letters to the editor came thick and fast, and the talking heads beat the same old drum. The fact that he was a 6ft 5in black man playing quarterback, dressing every gameday like he was attending a costume party from the future, and oozing earned arrogance didn’t endear him to huge swathes of the football-watching public. What was great about Newton was he knew how talented he was – he was unapologetically himself, from his dab to his raucous celebrations. In fact, the choice was so obvious that you were kind of unsure whether or not he should be suiting up for the aliens themselves. If we played the ET game any time between 20 - you can clone one player to play every position in a life or death game against an incoming alien invasion - Newton was the slam dunk pick for the humans. It just so happened that their “one” was bigger, faster and stronger than anything you had. The Panthers played option football, making every offensive snap a series of one-on-one match-ups. At the peak of his powers, Newton was so hard to stop because of his legs. Passing metrics do not account for what made Newton special though.
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