Ex-Panther Mike Tolbert says team mismanaged Cam Newton
Did Cam Newton get fair treatment from the Carolina Panthers? One of his former teammates doesn’t think so.
Mike Tolbert, who played fullback for the Panthers between 2012 and 2016, said the team has been “doing (Newton) wrong timing-wise” for two to three years. He criticized the Panthers for making Newton wait to get shoulder surgery in the offseason two years ago, and went further when discussing how they handled his foot injury in 2019.
“As soon as he got hurt (last) preseason against the Patriots, they were saying, ‘Oh, he’s got a high ankle sprain.’ I looked at it on film carefully. It’s not a high ankle sprain, you could tell that 10 minutes after the play,” Tolbert told Joseph Person of The Athletic. “You knew it’s a mid-foot sprain, Lisfranc, something like that. But you wait ’til December for him to beg you to have surgery. He shouldn’t have been out there Week 1 and 2. He shouldn’t have been out there probably ’til Week 4 or 5, at minimum.”
The Panthers also waited until late in the offseason to release Newton and allow him to seek a new team. There is speculation that doing so harmed his market, and now he may be stuck being a backup.
Have the Panthers handled Newton’s injuries correctly? It’s hard to tell from the outside, but there have definitely been questions about how they handled their star quarterback. Perhaps he’ll do better with a new team once he finds one.
