Late last month, Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton underwent surgery to repair an injury to his right shoulder. The injury clearly bothered Newton throughout the season, and anyone who watched the Panthers could see that it was affecting his play. Carolina shut him down late in the year after a loss that effectively ended the team's playoff hopes, but in reality they were toast well before that due to the state of their franchise QB's shoulder.
On Wednesday, Newton launched a YouTube channel and one of his first videos is about the experience with his shoulder surgery.
Within that video, Newton let on about exactly how the injury affected him during the season. He said he couldn't throw the ball more than 30 yards downfield.
"No lie," Newton said. "...I felt like defenses was exposing me because I couldn't throw the ball down field. Not being in a position physically to be able to make the throws that you know you're capable of making, that was the disheartening thing of the whole year."
That checks out. During the season, only 13 of Newton's 471 pass attempts were thrown at least 30 yards downfield, according to Sports Info Solutions. That works out to a rate of just 2.8 percent, far lower than his rates of 4.9 percent, 6.9 percent, and 7.3 percent during the previous three seasons. Not only that, but Newton completed a grand total of ZERO of those passes that traveled 30-plus yards in the air, indicating that he could not really get the ball to go where he wanted it to go, even when he was able to push it down the field. For a quarterback whose greatest strength as a passer is his arm strength and ability to get the ball downfield, that's a big problem. Hopefully for the sake of both Newton and the Panthers, this surgery fixes things and he looks more like himself next season.
