How the Carolina Panthers Got Cam Newton Right, and the NFL Got Its 2011 QB Class Wrong

This feature is part of Super Bowl Week at VICE Sports.

Five years on, the whole thing feels like a case study of groupthink gone wrong, but at the time Russ Lande felt like he had legitimate reasons for his skepticism. Lande, a former NFL scout and draft analyst, is in the business of evaluating prospective professional football players, which means he labors in a purely speculative field, sifting through risk factors in an attempt to quantify future potential. One of those factors is the ever-elusive designation of "character," and this, Lande admits, is the only reason he slipped Cam Newton down to fourth among quarterbacks on his own personal draft board back in 2011.

"He graded out ridiculously high based on his play," Lande, who also scouts for the Canadian Football League's Montreal Alouettes, told VICE Sports by phone this week. "I just really doubted if he could mature as a leader. And clearly, I was wrong. I think he's been one of the best leaders, on and off the field, that we have in the league."

In Lande's defense, he wasn't alone. Newton famously was pilloried by a number of reputable sources (and a few disreputable ones) before the Carolina Panthers chose him first overall. The franchise got things right: led by Newton's stellar play, the Panthers are in the Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, the other three quarterbacks selected in the first round of the 2011 NFL Draft—the same players Lande had ranked ahead of Newton, all of them taken among the first 12 picks—have proved inadequate as starting quarterbacks. One, Jake Locker, is already retired; another, Christian Ponder, may also be out of football for good. The remaining first-rounder, Blaine Gabbert, finished out the year as the starting quarterback for the woeful San Francisco 49ers, but will likely return to being a backup. He replaced Colin Kaepernick, who was chosen early in the second round pick and who might not start again in the NFL anytime soon. In fact, Andy Dalton, who was picked just before Kaepernick, is the only 2011 quarterback besides Newton who has enjoyed professional success.

So what happened? How did Carolina see the signal amid the noise, while other teams talked themselves into clearly inferior players?

There are many reasons the non-Newton quarterback class of 2011 has struggled: injuries, franchise weaknesses, coaching styles. In large part, however, each of them failed because NFL scouts, general managers, and coaches—the same people who projected a perceived, retrospectively ridiculous weakness onto Newton—either overlooked some inherent flaw or missed it entirely.

Take Locker, who came out of the University of Washington with a powerful arm and a laudable work ethic. Lande recalls sitting with a pair of NFL quarterback coaches and watching him throw at the Senior Bowl. A number of throws landed on the grass, untouched.

"What do you see?" Lande asked one of the coaches.

"He's inaccurate, and there's only one way to make him accurate," the coach replied. "And that's to pray."

The Tennessee Titans made Locker the No. 8 pick anyway. Hampered by that lack of accuracy and a series of injuries, Locker walked away from football last year. Two picks after Locker's selection, the Jacksonville Jaguars chose Gabbert out of the University of Missouri. Lande was high on him at the time, but then saw that Gabbert "was not a comfortable guy in the pocket. Physical-tool wise, he's a pretty special kid, but when he's not comfortable and doesn't have space, he's just not as good a quarterback."

With the No. 11 pick in that draft, the Houston Texans chose J.J. Watt, who may be the best defensive player of his generation. Next came the Minnesota Vikings, another team that at the time was desperately seeking a quarterback. They settled on Ponder, who emerged from Florida State as a potential steal. He played four seasons in Minnesota, never panned out, and was recently cut by the Denver Broncos after two weeks on the roster as a third-stringer.

"To this day, I can't figure out what it was that I missed [with Ponder]," Lande said. "But when you watched him [with the Vikings], he just wasn't a quick guy in the pocket. It didn't seem like things processed quickly for him on the field. The game's so much faster in the NFL, and what seems OK mentally in college sometimes is way too slow in the NFL. Eighty to 90 percent of it is above the shoulders."

In Newton's case, it's possible his preternatural self-assurance disguised his intelligence; it's also possible a certain amount of racial bias had the same effect upon NFL decision-makers. Perhaps people only saw what they expected to see. For Lande, the fact that Newton transferred from Florida amid allegations of academic transgressions and his seemingly frivolous attitude weighed heavily on his evaluation process. How many quarterbacks, he asks today, have essentially been kicked out of a school and wound up succeeding in the NFL?

Lande now regrets that he didn't look further into the situation at Florida; he regrets that he didn't account for the facts that Newton was an 18-year-old freshman with the Gators, and that none of his discipline problems resurfaced during his one year at Auburn, when he won the Heisman Trophy and a national championship. He regrets that he didn't listen to the veteran scout who told him that not only did he have zero concerns about Newton's attitude but that he also graded Newton as the best prospect the he had seen in 20 years. These are the mistakes you make when you're trafficking in an imprecise business, and these are mistakes Lande says he will seek to avoid moving forward.

"To me, Newton is a once-in-a-generation thing—you could have asked a ton of people character-wise and they would have said the same things," Lande said. "But I think more than anything, it's going to put an emphasis on, 'Hey guys, let's be thorough and get every piece of detail you can imagine.'"

This is precisely what Panthers offensive coordinator Mike Shula endeavored to do that spring, back when he was serving as the team's quarterback coach. Shula told VICE Sports that he used his connections to speak to a number of Newton's former coaches, including Charlie Strong, then an assistant coach at Florida, who "had a lot of good things to say about Cam."

I asked Shula whether the skepticism over Newton's character surprised him, and he grinned.

"Nothing really surprises me anymore, in football or in scouting," he said. "Cam was too talented. I wanted to be selfish. I didn't want anyone else to have fun coaching this guy."

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