Here's why the Panthers aren't sweating Cam Newton's Super Bowl meltdown
Greg Olsen and Thomas Davis explain why Newton's press conference isn't an issue
By
Will Brinson
•
2 min read
The post-Super Bowl press conference from Cam Newton was a blight on an otherwise nearly perfect season. The 15-1 Panthers got beat up by the Broncos in the Super Bowl, but the lowlight for the MVP was his media session, in which a sullen Newton abruptly left the press conference after declining to answer many questions.
Was the whole thing overblown? Of course it was. This is 2016. Everything is overblown. But it was still a bad look. Newton knows he could have handled things better. The critical thing for Cam is to grow from it and, according to teammate Thomas Davis during a recent Sirius XM interview, that's exactly what happened.
"Cam understands and he knows that, in that situation, being who he is, being the role model that he is, he has to handle that situation better," Davis said "And he's learned from that, I feel like. Hopefully, we're never in that position again where we're losing the Super Bowl, but I definitely feel like Cam has matured since that point and he's definitely going to be much better at handling different adverse situations like that."
Newton is the leader on the team, but there are few players as respected as Davis. If he says he thinks Cam matured from the issue, he might as well be saying it for the entire team. It's also something echoed by the coaching staff in various forms throughout the offseason.
Another teammate, tight end Greg Olsen, just thinks the whole thing was overblown in the first place and there isn't an issue with Carolina and how Cam handled things.
"Some people may not like it," Olsen told Adam Schein on Mad Dog Sports Radio. "It might not be traditional or what they expected but Cam's true to himself and at the end of the day the only thing that matters is how do the guys in the locker room respond to him -- how the guys in the locker room respect him and rally around him -- and that's never been an issue since the day he got here as a rookie in 2011."
Olsen was either one or two podiums over from Newton when things went down in the postgame media area. I have a recording of Olsen's postgame comments and you can hear Aqib Talib yelling about the game on it because of how thinly the separation from the winners and losers was after the Super Bowl.
The biggest obstacle for Newton and the Panthers was putting last year behind them and moving forward. If all the chatter about Cam not climaxing and Cam maturing are real, they're very much focused on 2016.
