People are getting caught up on the fact that we just resigned Cam Newton. That's understandable, but I believe some parts of our fanbase are expecting too much and some are expecting too little. Cam isn't what he was, but he's also an upgrade over what we had and frankly this team doesn't need that much at the QB position as things are now. We need Cam to protect the football, find the open man, sustain drives so that our defense isn't pinned back, and be a vocal leader for our offense. Anything else like his running ability is just gravy.

A lot of folks have soured on our defense but I personally think this is a little misguided. They still make mistakes, but most of them are very common and typical of a younger unit such as overrunning sacks, biting on read options and play fakes, and the occasional large rushing lane.

You don't want this obviously but it's the NFL and our defense is young and growing, poo happens. As things are now, our defense is ranked 31st in average starting field position, the defense being set up at the opponents 32 yard line on average. The only team they are ahead of are the Jets, who are ranked DEAD LAST in points allowed. In fact of the bottom ten lowest ranked teams by this metric, only two have good defenses. The Buffalo Bills who come in at 26th (#1 PF, #1 YDS) and the Pittsburgh Steelers who come in at 22nd (#8 PF, #14 YDS). On the year our defense ranks 7th in PF and 2nd in YDS, with that going up to 5th in PF and unchanged in yards if you look at the per drive stats. As well, the average starting field position for the D predictably gets worse in the third quarter with them on average being set up at the 35 yard line (as seen below). This isn't a huge difference, but it's still considerable and the offense needs to improve in the third and stop turning the ball over so much in rapid succession.

So where does Cam come into this? Well we need Cam to be careful with the ball. For the most part last season he was. Though his overall statline of 21 total tds to 10 turnovers nor his total yardage of 3,249 yards were very impressive, he had 5 ints immediately after getting off of the rona list in the two games afterwards but finished weeks 6 through 16 with only 3 ints to 6 touchdown passes. He also added 7 more rushing touchdowns in this span, meaning he had 14 total tds (1 receiving td in week 17) to only 3 total turnovers over the last 10 weeks of the season.

This is despite a pourous receiving cast, questionable offensive playcaller, and being pressured at a percentage the tenth highest of any QB last season at 26%. Those receivers by the way mostly played better last season with Cam than they have so far this year. Julian Edelman had his best career game with Cam, Jakobi Meyers was higher/more efficient in nearly every category last year than he is so far this year (Catch%, YPG, Y/TG, Y/REC, you name it), and he even got 600 yards out of Damiere Byrd.

It's also worth considering that our offensive line while still definitely bad, has slightly improved from being unquestionably bottom 2 in the last couple weeks. In week 8, the offensive line only allowed 5 hurries and 2 QB hits. In week 9, it allowed five pressures and 1 sack according to PFF. Will this continue? Probably not, at least not at this rate, but it's at least an encouraging sign though the injury to Paradis hurts. There's also the fact he'll have a much better supporting cast than he had in New England with CMC, DJ, Robby and other solid support pieces like Chubba.

There are some questions regarding the fit though. Cam has never really played in a pure west coast system like offensive coordinator Joe Brady runs. Speaking of Brady, there's been a lot of concerns over him. These are absolutely reasonable but you must question how much of this mess is his fault. We have a bad offensive line and had a quarterback who misses open receivers, and it was known going in that Brady did not call the plays at LSU meaning he'd have growing pains there. Sam also just misses open receivers and throws a lot of hospitial balls. It's no coincidence that our receivers are dropping so many more passes than usual all of the sudden. Joe's playcalling needs to improve though as the team has been called out publically by opposing defensive players for running repetitive routes. If he can't get that fixed, he doesn't got long at this level; growing pains or not.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about this move that will be answered soon, but for now I feel good about it even from just a football perspective. Cam doesn't need to be great, he just needs to be a veteran leader for this young team and offense, get the ball to open receivers, eat up clock, and prevent giving our defense short fields by taking good care of the ball. His now limited deep ball's wild misses and occasional spike at the ground will occur in some unfortunate instances, but I think Cam can once again be great for this team; just in a much different way compared to the big play flash of his vintage days.