National Football League

Is Cam Newton ready for NFL?

Published Apr. 27, 2011 1:00 a.m. ET

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One minute, he was throwing spirals to 10-year-olds, chest-bumping children and celebrating playground touchdowns like he was about to beat Alabama again. The next, he was evading reporters on his way into a black Escalade outside a Chelsea park, headed from an NFL charity event and media availability session to a temporary reprieve from the spotlight’s constant glare.

There are so, so many questions about Cam Newton and his future in the NFL. But if he’s already ducking the easy ones before he’s thrown his first professional pass, the suspicion only grows about how he’ll handle the most important of all.

The Carolina Panthers appear set to make Newton the No. 1 overall pick when the NFL draft start Thursday, a designation that will make him both a symbol of rebirth for a struggling franchise and a target of lifelong scrutiny. But how can the Panthers risk such an important draft choice, and such an important position, on a player who doesn’t appear ready for everything it entails?

With everything at stake — the money, the position and the added pressure of forever being called the No. 1 pick — Carolina would be better served to pass.

For one brilliant season at Auburn, Newton thrived under a barrage of cynicism about whether he broke NCAA rules, brushing aside almost weekly accusations as easily as he did SEC linebackers. The NFL draft process, however, has exposed what 80,000 hostile fans and all those “Scam Newton” signs could not.

As Newton’s game has been picked apart for endless hours on television, as voices have grown louder questioning his mechanics, style of play and leadership, Newton has grown further from the player who openly told reporters at the NFL Scouting Combine that he wanted to be an “entertainer-slash-icon.”

Since then, he’s let everyone around him do the talking, from Warren Moon’s claims last month that the criticism was rooted in racism, to the eve of the draft, when Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders admitted that Newton wasn’t taking well to the 24-7 analysis of his ability.

“When he came out of Pee-Wee football, the high schools were tearing his door down saying, ‘I need you, I need you,’” said Sanders, who has been informally advising Newton for the past few months. “The colleges were saying, ‘I need you, I need you.’ This is the first time these guys get criticized. That affects guys, especially quarterbacks.”

But is it really what a franchise player is made of? With so much riding on this pick, it would be foolish of Carolina to risk finding out.

For Newton, the ascent from junior college nobody to No. 1 draft pick happened so quickly and with such little warning — he didn’t even have a full page in Auburn’s media guide last August — that it would have been impossible to groom him for this moment, especially at a position where players typically have years in the spotlight under their belt.

Last year’s No. 1 pick, Sam Bradford, was a three-year starter at Oklahoma. Matthew Stafford, who went first to Detroit the year before, was a national player of the year in high school. The Mannings had been prepared for their star turns almost since birth. There’s always uncertainty around drafting a quarterback; it’s the very nature of what will happen tonight. But Newton’s path here is truly like none other, a burden both for him and the team that drafts him.

Even at Auburn, where he instantly transformed a middling SEC program into a national champion, Newton operated in a cocoon of success and protection that he’ll never have again. Once the story broke in early November that his father Cecil Newton had tried to engineer a pay-for-play scheme in the midst of his son’s recruitment, Auburn pretty much shut off media access until it was mandated at the SEC championship game.

But even as he became the most polarizing figure in college football, becoming the face of a 2-14 pro franchise has a different way of stripping everything bare. Starting quarterbacks are more than just football players; like it or not, they’re expected to be team spokesmen and civic representatives. Those who can’t handle all aspects of the job tend to fail spectacularly. And right now, there are enough red flags to legitimately wonder whether picking him No. 1 could end up being more curse than blessing.

“I told Cameron, this is not a black, white, Hispanic, Asian thing,” Sanders said. “This is just how it is. But understand this: you can’t take your emotional high of winning the Heisman, winning the national championship, and not expect to be criticized. Because when you’re extreme in one level, you’re going to have extreme troubles on the other end. And this ain’t even trouble.”

Newton may well be the most talented player in tonight’s draft, but his public responsibilities are about to change in a major way. His test now won’t be answering whether his father broke NCAA rules, but why he can’t hit an open receiver with the game on the line.

“I’m not doing any interviews,” Newton said just over 24 hours before the biggest day of his life.

Soon enough, there won’t be an Escalade waiting for him to run and hide.

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