Carolina Panthers: Cam Newton Gets Hit, Foul on Him

The Carolina Panthers can’t seem to catch a break when it comes to officiating Cam Newton.

The Carolina Panthers won the game. They even played well. Yet the big story coming out of the game is not that the Panthers have hung on to the barest of wild card chances or that Washington basically done goofed by losing. No the story is the continuing saga between Cam Newton and the referees.

When the Broncos did it, I took the side that the Broncos defense was getting special recognition as the self-proclaimed ‘best defense ever.’ I was willing to listen to the idea that this was not a Cam problem. Then came the rest of the season. Cam got knocked out of a game and missed a game. He went to the commissioner’s desk with this. Yet here we are again.

Newton ran for a first down a third down play. The defense was catching up so Cam slid. That is what people have wanted Cam to do. If you give yourself up as a quarterback they can’t hit you. Redskins defender Trent Murphy was going to hit him anyway. Maybe he was already committed before Cam slid or maybe defenses always take advantage to hit the quarterback when they can.

Cam got hit in the head on the slide. He retaliated by kind of flipping the ball at Murphy. The flag was thrown. The referees called taunting on Cam. The hit was not flagged. This wasn’t even the Denver hit where the refs ruled intentional grounding to counteract the roughing penalty. There was no offsetting penalty here. The No Fun League trumped ‘Player Safety’ as the rule of the day.

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Of course there are people that still maintain Cam is a whiner because other quarterbacks have it just as bad. Those guys missed the Saints game where the slightest contact from Charles Johnson brought Drew Brees down after the pass. There was a flag there. Or perhaps the Washington game where Kirk Cousins bought fifteen yards on Kawann Short because Short pushed him out of bounds while he was in bounds and Cousins was not trying to slide. Flag. Fifteen yards.

The hypocrisy of the NFL gets tiresome after awhile. The league punishes excessive celebrations unless you jump into a Salvation Army bin. The league cares about player safety unless you are 6’5 and 240 lbs. The Panthers have it tough enough with injuries, stop making them pay for simply having an unusual quarterback.