How good is Cam Newton?

The Game Room
1

You’re choosing up sides for a football season that starts tomorrow (assume a wizard has come by to heal any nagging, extant injuries and to see to it that no one needs training camp to learn the playbook, etc.). Among quarterbacks, where do you rank Cam Newton for purposes of having the best QB for this one season only – we’re not concerned with long term value, nor how good their careers have been to this point (excepting that this informs us about their present value). We just care about how good they are right now.
I probably have him ranked higher than most. If I stop to actually make a list, Newton winds up at #5:

  1. Tom Brady
  2. Aaron Rodgers
        • tier - - - -
  1. Russel Wilson
  2. Ben Roethlisberger
  3. Cam Newton
  4. Drew Brees
  5. Philip Rivers
        • tier - - - -
  1. Carson Palmer
  2. Andrew Luck
  3. Andy Dalton
        • tier - - - -
          11-13) Carr, Eli, Ryan? (Around and especially after here it gets very muddled.)
          There’s a lot of uncertainty. Is Luck’s swoon just the result of the Colts imploding around him, or does this season mark a genuine regression and suggest he’s not as good as we thought? Andy Dalton’s having a career year: is this indicative of a new level of performance going forward, or do his largely mediocre numbers from the preceding four seasons ultimately say more about him than this small sample size? Etc.

The main reason I rank Newton where he is is his supporting cast: he’s always had a bad one. He has a good pass-catching TE. He had a few years of late-career Steve Smith, with rapidly diminishing returns after his rookie season. Last year he had a promising but raw rookie WR. Outside of these few modest assets, his receiving targets have been crap and worse crap. This year he has bar none the worst WRs in the league, and still the Panthers offense is solidly above average, as it has been for each of his 5 seasons except 2014.

Basically he’s Carolina’s whole offense. He adds an enormous amount of value to the running game – not just with his ow rushes, but by opening up holes for the RBs by on forcing the defense to account for the *threat *of his rushes. (This is a well-established phenomenon with rushing QBs.).
Thoughts? Where do you rank ol’ Cam?

2

Based on this season, he’s the best QB in the league. So top tier. And doing it without a ton of offensive weapons.

3

By the standards the OP described, I’d put him in third place behind Brady and Rodgers.

4

I’d have Brady, Rodgers and Roethlisberger, then a next tier of Cam, Palmer and Wilson.

5

How so? His statistics certainly don’t bear out “best QB in the league”. “Best QB in the league” does not equal “QB of the team with the best record in the league”.

Do you consider Russell Wilson to be the best QB or an MVP candidate? Because, with the exception of TD passes and rushes, Wilson is about on par with Cam’s stats. Yet no one is talking about Wilson for MVP because his team isn’t undefeated.

6

The main knock on Cam is accuracy. He’s only completing like 58% of his passes. Only slightly higher than Blake Bortles, who has a lot more passing yards on more attempts. I think a lot of Cam’s statistical deficiencies can be linked to his pass catchers, who often times don’t catch. He’s got Olsen and…? Ted Ginn has never been a #1 receiver in his life. But if you watch Cam play, he’s usually pretty accurate and has a very strong arm. Throw in his running ability and I’d take him on my team over any other QB right now.

7

Carolina has 17 drops on the season, which ranks them 12th in the NFL. Not great, but not nearly enough to blame his average statistical performances on his WR’s. Hell, Blake Bortles’ team has 20 drops. And he has more touchdowns and a comparable TD/Int percentage to Newton. I’m not saying Bortles is as good as Cam, only that drops isn’t a good metric to excuse away statistical underperformance.

Yep. He has sub average pass catchers, and a strong arm. But he also has a stellar defense that has helped him win as many games as he has this year. And those wins are why he’s even being mentioned as MVP.

Any other QB? Over Brady? Rodgers? I find that … interesting.

8

The thing about Cam is that he FITS how the Panthers want to play better than any other QB out there. The Panthers are built like a throwback team from the 60s or 70s - stout defense, run the ball, eliminate turnovers, and take your deep shots down the field.

Newton’s completion percentage isn’t near the top of the league, but look at what the Panthers do when they do throw it. It’s deep and intermediate passes. The short passes that Brady and Rogers use to rack up the completions go instead to Jonathon Stewart or Mike Tolbert running the ball for 3 yards and a cloud of turf. Add in Cam’s designed runs and the Panthers don’t feature a short, controlled West Coast ype pass attack. And, to be fair, Cam may not be the best QB to run that type of offense, as the main knock on him is that he only has two gears on his passes - hard and harder. He’s gotten better I feel, but still struggles with passes that require a soft touch. Witness the 3rd and 1 miss to a wide open Greg Olsen, and the 4th down conversion at the 2 minute warning to Olsen. Those should have been easy completions and only a tremendous effort by Olsen allowed Cam to go 1-2 on those.

As a longtime Panthers fan, I can say that Cam has put in a ton of work on becoming a better pocket passer. A great example was the last TD to Cotchery yesterday. A pass designed to go out to the left flat - and the Saints covered it up, Cam went through his progressions and wound up coming off to Cotchery, who was on the back side of the play - maybe the third or fourth read onb that route? In prior years, Cam would have taken off running, but he hung in the pocket and made a legitimate NFL read and throw.

So, where do I rank him this year? For me, he’s in there with Brady and Rogers as a Top 3 QB. He’s improving on his pocket presence, but still will never look like a ‘classic’ QB, but the Panthers don’t want him to be another in a line of ‘classic’ QBs. They want him to be the first in his own unique line.

Wargamer
Panther fanboi since 1995

9

I was going to say many of the same things Wargamer said. I have been a fairly harsh critic of Newton in the past on this board. His mechanics are not great. But he has made huge strides this year as a quarterback. He was always a gifted athlete and a good football player. But he is now a much better NFL quarterback. Screw traditional passing stats. His running ability, not just to get yards, or to avoid pressure, but to change the way defenses play the Panthers, cannot be measured. He lost his best WR in the pre-season. He has managed to go 12-0 with a great TE and a ragtag group of receivers. Yes, they run well. The defense absolutely keeps them in games and gives Cam a lot of short field possessions. For this team, I wouldn’t trade him for anyone. Overall, I still rank Brady, Rodgers and Big Ben ahead of him. But that’s it.

10

So the argument is basically “he’s not actually that good, but he doesn’t need to be so I’m going to rank him highly anyway?”

11

Who made that argument?

12

Wargamer.

13

Varlos,

How do you reconcile your (and it looks like, the rest of the posters here too) high ranking of Newton’s performance with people like Pro Football Focus ranking him at 13th as of November 16th, albeit with the best NFL QB game performance according to PFF this year against the Saints. Also, Football Outsiders have him 18th in DYAR, 17th in DVOA, 20th in QBR, and with half of the “Effective Yards” of Brady? I get that a lot of Newton’s value is in his legs, and if you add his running performance to his passing performance, it moves him up to ~400 DYAR, and around 2900 Effective Yards, both right behind Matt Stafford oddly enough. The FO stats don’t include his Saints performance, so he’ll be a bit better than those; but still, they rank him around 9th or 10th if you count his running, not top 3 in football. He does have an abysmal receiving corps this year, with Benjamin out and no more Steve Smith.

I haven’t been watching much football this year, though I have been surprised by how well the Panthers have done so far. I thought the Texans should have beaten them in their game early this year, and frankly, the Texans aren’t very good. Aren’t the Panthers mostly getting it done with great defense (2nd according to FO) and a 27th ranked strength of schedule?

14

I don’t think Wargamer’s comments boil down to “not actually that good.”

If MVP voting were today, who would you vote for? Who do you think would win it? If Cam won MVP, would it be justified?

To be honest, when Cam was drafted I thought he’d be a flash in the pan - in and out of the league in a couple years or become a lifetime backup. Guys who run a super simple college offense usually don’t amount to much in the NFL when they have to actually read a defense. His improvement has been amazing.

15

I dunno, he said he’s got no touch and was impressed just because he didn’t go to his first choice receiver. Nobody would gush about Brady or Rodgers going to a second choice, it’s assumed they have that ability.

16

I agree. In this thread, Newton is being greatly overvalued, and Palmer is being greatly undervalued. Now, if I were really building a football team for the future, I wouldn’t build around Palmer since he’s 35 already. But for a hypothetical one-year league based on the talent level he’s exhibiting this year? I’d probably go Palmer, then Brady, Rogers, Dalton, Wilson, Roethlisberger, then Newton. Maybe even Romo, then Newton, assuming the magical injury-healing fairy from the OP.

17

I guess I underestimated how high most people are on Cam. I thought people would mostly take his raw, individual stats at face value, and rank him in like the 10-15 range.

l’m a big believer in advanced stats like FO’s (and put almost zero stock in Wins), but they’re subject to the same limitations as the traditional stats when used to judge individual players – i.e., a football player’s numbers are far too context-dependent to paint an accurate picture on their own.

Take Tom Brady. Up through 2006, he was roughly the 9th-best QB statistically (DVOA ranks of 12, 16, 13, 4, 5, 10; passer rating in the same range). Then, starting in 2007, he suddenly started putting numbers in line with those of an all-time great (1, 2, 1, 3, 1). Did he get a lot better overnight? Of course not. It’s just that he went, all at once, from throwing to Reche Caldwell and Troy Brown to throwing to Randy Moss and Wes Welker.

To judge a QB, l think it’s often better to look at the whole offense’s DVOA, then try to gauge how far out of line that is with the talent at the rest of positions (especially for a running QB like Newton, whose presence had a large effect on the running game’s numbers). Right now Carolina’s 11th in offensive DVOA, which is about where they’ve generally been during Newton’s tenure. But with the rest of the talent that the Panthers have had the past few year, what do you think their offense would look like with a generic, league-average QB? Alex Smith, say, or Joe Flacco? YMMV, but I personally just can’t see it being anything other than borderline-disastrous. (Or, God, imagine Jay Cutler who, despite having Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffrey from 2012-14, only managed DVOA ranks of 27, 13, and 22.)

Maybe, but you don’t thing that’s putting too much weight on the small sample size of his recent performance? How much time does a veteran player have to spend as one of the best statistical QBs for us to reasonably infer that that’s now his actual, *expected *level of performance?

18

Are you referring specifically to the high rank of Palmer? It’s always looked to me like Palmer’s been awesome when close to 100% healthy, but he’s rarely near 100% healthy. At the very least, he’s been incredible over the past two seasons.

19

He’s been very good when healthy, but he hasn’t been even close to “arguably-the-best-QB” good since 2006. I tend to put more stock in regression to the mean.

20

“over any other QB. . . ?” Really? Do you see who Brady’s throwing to?