Can Newton make transition to NFL?
Cam Newton understands exactly what is at stake here, and precisely what question the Panthers must answer before making him the No. 1 overall pick in Thursday's NFL draft.
If Carolina general manager Marty Hurney and coach Ron Rivera believe the star Auburn quarterback can make the fundamental transformation from running the spread offense in college to the more traditional schemes of the NFL, they'll stake their future on the charismatic but somewhat raw 21-year-old.
If not, it'll be someone else, perhaps Missouri's Blaine Gabbert or lower down in the draft with Ryan Mallett of Arkansas, two other quarterbacks who operated from the spread offense and are about to make the quantum leap from a relatively simple yet wide-open system to the NFL's version of quantum physics.
Newton knows.
"Obviously, everybody knows that Cam has been in a spread offense,'' Newton said, "and I have been trying to work as much as possible on trying to be fluid in coming from under center, with the three-step game, the five-step, also the seven-step drop. I've been working day and night in the film room, on the chalkboard or on the field throwing rocks."
Newton is intent on proving to the skeptics -- and there are plenty of them -- that he won't fall victim to the trend of "spread" quarterbacks failing to make the transition to the pros. But he'll be fighting history, because the list of quarterback busts in recent years is long and expensive. It includes names such as Alex Smith of the 49ers, J.P. Losman of the Bills, Vince Young of the Titans, JaMarcus Russell of the Raiders, Matt Leinart of the Cardinals and Pat White of the Dolphins.
Like Newton, many of them came from college programs with offenses in which the quarterback operates primarily from the shotgun formation. These schemes are designed to spread the field by lining up multiple receivers to open up the passing lanes and create more space for running backs by forcing the defense to spread apart.
The NFL has adopted some elements of the college version of the spread offense, and you're seeing far more multiple-receiver sets now than ever before. But even so, the NFL's offenses remain somewhat more conservative, and many teams -- including the Jets -- still employ a run-first approach.
Factor in the complicated schemes on offense and defense in the NFL, and these incredibly intricate nuances require a pro quarterback to know much more about all aspects of the game to become an elite performer.
"The thing you worry about these guys coming into the NFL is the mental part of it," former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason said. "With Cam Newton [at Auburn], they're yelling out a number from the sideline, and then they run the play. You can't come out in base formations in the NFL and just run the play."
Esiason thinks Gabbert might be the more NFL-ready quarterback, even though he, too, played in the spread at Missouri.
"You look at Blaine Gabbert, who had a 42 [out of 50] on the Wonderlic [intelligence] test," said Esiason, a WFAN radio host and NFL analyst for CBS who also will be involved in a predraft show with TXN Sports this week. "You have to look at whose learning curve is going to develop first."
As a measure of how complicated it is for a quarterback to go from college to the pros, Esiason recalled his early days with the Bengals in 1984.
"One of the great things is [coach] Sam Wyche expected me to learn the entire offense, signaling, audibles, everything," Esiason said. "You have to be able to walk into the room and have 52 guys believe in you. I'm sure guys like Cris Collinsworth thought I was an idiot."
But Esiason developed into an NFL MVP and led the Bengals to the Super Bowl after the 1988 season.
Collinsworth, an NBC analyst, now sees many of today's young quarterbacks attempting to make the difficult transition to the NFL -- with mixed results. And he is highly skeptical about Newton's chances.
"I just have a ton of questions," Collinsworth said. "We're talking about the No. 1 overall pick in the draft. He does have off-the-field issues at Florida and Auburn. Accuracy issues showed up a little bit. He never called plays or made adjustments at the line of scrimmage at Auburn."
A similar debate involving a quarterback who came from the spread offense surfaced in 2006, when it was Alex Smith vs. Aaron Rodgers.
Smith starred in Urban Meyer's wide-open offense at Utah. Rodgers was somewhat less productive under Jeff Tedford at California.
The 49ers took Smith No. 1 overall. Rodgers was taken by the Packers at No. 24.
Smith wound up being a big disappointment for the 49ers. Rodgers is the reigning Super Bowl championship quarterback.
It's just another example of the difficulty in projecting quarterbacks. "I think that is a hard position to evaluate more and more because most colleges now run the spread offense," said Giants GM Jerry Reese, a former quarterback at Tennessee-Martin. "Really, it is a different animal than what we do in the NFL. But you just have to see what the skill set is."
Gabbert thinks he has the skill set to make the transition.
"We're in the shotgun [in college] about 98 percent of the time, so that's what I've been working on and focusing on," Gabbert said. "It's an extremely important process . . . and I've done a great job so far and haven't seen a problem with it."
Gabbert will find out Thursday just how great a job he has done convincing an NFL team he's worth the investment. So will Newton -- and every other quarterback about to make the biggest athletic transition of his life.
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