Newton’s postgame reaction produces silly overreactions
Sure, Peyton Manning winning Super Bowl 50 in the twilight of his career was a significant moment, one that was often discussed and came to fruition Sunday in Santa Clara, Calif., with the Denver Broncos’ 24-10 victory against the Carolina Panthers.
But Panthers quarterback Cam Newton’s role as some kind of emotional avatar for the NFL overshadowed much of the commentary about the game, particularly in the final moments of the fourth quarter. And his postgame news conference unleashed writers who might have been hesitant to criticize Newton’s emotional state, with his brief, tersely worded comments an excuse to turn his defeat at the hands of an elite NFL defense into something larger. Something about his character. Something preordained by all the fun he’d had all season.
I don’t know Newton. But I do know the larger context within which his 2015 season occurred, and there’s a lot going on here that we ought to unpack to properly understand what happened and what we can expect from Newton and the Panthers going forward.
First: The idea of the Super Bowl loss being reflective of a larger limitation of Newton is pretty silly. Newton just completed an age-26 season for the ages. He was the NFL MVP, the Panthers went 15-1 in the regular season, and he put together two strong playoff performances to lead Carolina into the Super Bowl. There’s nothing inherent in that final game itself that tells us something bigger, something mystical about a quarterback or anybody else.
We’d have learned this through Manning if he’d managed to reach a Super Bowl by 26. But he didn’t. In his age-26 season, Manning crashed out of the wild-card playoff round, losing to the New York Jets 41-0. He passed for 137 yards and was intercepted twice. Regardless, there were plenty who wrote him off then, and, really, right up until the moment in early 2007 when he and the Indianapolis Colts beat the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI and finally earned his validation.
Now, did Manning become a different quarterback in that moment? A different leader? A different man? Come on. He had a good game at the right time. He had a better team around him. It all came together. That’s all.
And so it is with Newton, who obviously didn’t play his best game Sunday. A great unknown is how close to 100% he was throughout the game. He was hit, early and hard, and he ran the wrong way at halftime. He looked very different on the sideline. He was dramatically subdued at his postgame news conference.
It is impossible to know what we know about the NFL’s physical impact on the brain and not at least have lingering questions about whether Newton had trouble with his cognition from hits he took Sunday, not to mention whether the Panthers or the NFL did due diligence to see how healthy Newton was as the biggest figure in the biggest game of the 2015 season.
But let’s leave those questions aside and try to answer a simpler one instead: Just how is the Super Bowl’s losing quarterback supposed to act?
If Newton had come out smiling at his news conference, acting unbothered after seeing his team come so close yet short of the ultimate professional goal, would his critics have been silent? Of course not. He’d have been described as uncaring and less than fully invested in his career and the work done on the field, an easy and ludicrous charge to lob at the guy who takes the hits and whose work is reflected in the statistics, victories and relationships with his teammates.
Accordingly, even the idea that Newton’s news conference has much of anything to do with his actual job doesn’t have much to do with reality. Sure, for people in the news media, it is easier and better when athletes take the time to talk to them, provide fuller answers and relate in such a way that writers can more accurately capture what the athletes are going through.
It’s also, presumably, useful to athletes and teams as well, as this is a primary conduit to the fans, whose money supports the league and thus provides the impetus for allowing media members into the airspace of these elite athletes moments after games.
But if there’s a dubious connection at best between a player’s ability to get away from the Denver pass rush and his larger character, there’s even less of one between that player’s ability to answer questions well after a crushing loss and what we can expect from that player in the future.
Those who determined that Manning wouldn’t win because of something larger gleaned from his 41-0 loss to the Jets — or any of his other playoff losses before he ascended into the pantheon of “proven winners” with that first Super Bowl triumph — turned out to be completely wrong. And let’s not forget that in 2010, after Manning had won his first Lombardi Trophy but his Colts lost to the New Orleans Saints in Super Bowl XLIV to conclude the 2009 season, he declined to shake hands with the New Orleans players in the moments after the defeat.
What does this say about Manning? Frankly, it says almost exactly what Newton’s postgame news conference says about Newton: That those competing at the highest level really, really don’t like to lose. It says how they deal with it in the immediate moments following that loss, with emotions at their most intense and hundreds of millions watching them, is particular to them, and human, and as easy to judge as it is useless to extrapolate from.
Newton will deal with this loss in his own way, and when he takes the field next season, he’ll be the reigning MVP for a Panthers team that probably will have added talent to the receiving corps and won’t experience multifumble games from Mike Tolbert, who’d gone four seasons without losing any before Super Bowl 50.
And the hope is that we can better judge Newton’s career as a career and avoid this ludicrous binary construct that informs much of the public discussion about “those who have won a Super Bowl” and “those who haven’t,” and maybe just sit back and enjoy a talented, charismatic quarterback for however many years he has left to play.