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:
- Tom Brady
- Aaron Rodgers
-
-
-
- tier - - - -
-
-
- Russel Wilson
- Ben Roethlisberger
- Cam Newton
- Drew Brees
- Philip Rivers
-
-
-
- tier - - - -
-
-
- Carson Palmer
- Andrew Luck
- 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.
- tier - - - -
-
-
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?