Cam Newton is on the verge of completing a near-perfect season and becoming the face of the NFL.
The always-smiling, fun-loving quarterback of the Carolina Panthers is one win away from finishing off what has been a dominant campaign and stamping his mark on history.
A Carolina victory in the Super Bowl over the offensively-challenged Denver Broncos feels inevitable, serving as the fitting conclusion to what has felt like the Panthers’ year all along.
The most extraordinary part of Newton and the franchise’s overwhelming season up to this point is how unexpected it was.
The names of young quarterbacks who many expected to take over the league coming into training camp included Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson, but few saw Newton reaching the level of transcendence he has.
The reason for that was simple: Newton was entering his fifth year without making much noise on the playoff stage with a lack of gaudy numbers. He also lost his number one wide receiver Kelvin Benjamin for the season to injury in August, a blow to what was already an unassuming stable of weapons.
To say there was a sense that Newton had already come close to reaching his ceiling is strong, but there was doubt that he was capable of becoming what he has.
The Panthers’ defence has remained a strength of the team, but the leap taken by Newton and the offence is the reason they’ve become the most complete team and on the cusp of hoisting the Lombardi Trophy.
In the age of Twitter and Vine, Newton and Curry have become their sports’ greatest entertainers, all while constantly winning
In the regular season, the Panthers averaged the most points in the league at 31.3. If there was any inkling that those results were mainly the reason of weak competition, Newton proceeded to carve up the stout Seattle Seahawks in the first half of the divisional round en route to 31 points, before dismantling a ferocious Arizona Cardinals squad to the tune of 49 points in the NFC Championship.
Cross-sport comparisons are never perfect, but Newton, in many ways, is the NFL’s version of the NBA’s reigning MVP Stephen Curry. Both athletes do it in unconventional ways – Curry with his video game-like shooting and Newton with his duel-threat ability to bulldoze defences on the ground while picking them apart with laser passes through the air.
But more than what they do on the court or field, it’s how they do it that makes them so similar.
Like Curry, Newton plays with such supreme confidence and swagger that it can border arrogance when he’s ‘dabbing’ in the end zone. In the age of Twitter and Vine, Newton and Curry have become their sports’ greatest entertainers, all while constantly winning.
Newton still has to match his basketball counterpart and complete his magical year with a title, but if he’s able to overcome a Denver defence that just made arguably the greatest quarterback of all-time look pedestrian, he’ll be in rarefied air for current sporting icons.
An uncomfortable story Carolina owner Jerry Richardson shared in the summer of 2011 after recently selecting Newton first overall in the draft was that he told his new quarterback to keep his image tattoo and piercing-free.
The fact is, Newton has never needed either to express his identity, the same personality which is about to engulf the league.
