Why the Patriots probably won’t be signing Cam Newton

Cam Newton is going to be freely available, but the New England Patriots are highly unlikely to sign him.

For the first time in basically 20 years, the New England Patriots have a question mark at quarterback after Tom Brady’s departure. Cam Newton is now set to be cut by the Carolina Panthers, and he’s been easy to point to as an option for New England.

As the Panthers moved to move on from Newton, the trade market for him was necessarily complicated. Team doctors are unable to do physicals as the coronavirus situation remains ongoing, and Newton has had his last two seasons shortened by injury. When it came down to it, Carolina would clear the same amount of cap space ($19.1 million), with the same amount of dead money ($2 million), whether they traded or cut Newton. And trading him became progressively unlikely.

Along with the risk attached to not being able to check him out physically on-site, a team that traded for Newton was going to have to take on his $19.1 million base salary and $21.1 million cap hit for 2020. That obligation is gone now, for any team that remains interested in having him.

6 RINGS 1 GOAT t-shirt by BreakingT

Buy Now!

Buy Now!

As of right now, after cutting kicker Stephen Gostkowski, the Patriots have $6.9 million in cap space (according to Spotrac). There has to be room available to sign their draft picks, and there are other needs to fill in the next waves of free agency.

So unless Newton is willing to take a very cheap deal, worth a small fraction of what he would have made this year, he won’t be a Patriot. The Los Angeles Chargers and Las Vegas Raiders could make a run at him, and there’s a case for others to be in the mix (Miami Dolphins, Washington Redskins, Chicago Bears), but Newton’s market does not look particularly robust in the wake of other moves made for quarterbacks. The Panthers really did him no favor by waiting until the first wave of free agency was done before cutting him.

It’s been enticing to think about the possibility of Newton, with the assumption of full health, as Brady’s successor. But unless something dramatically changes, a marriage of the Patriots and the 2015 NFL MVP is not going to happen.