Cam Newton appears to have burned bridges with his former Carolina Panthers teammates

I cannot emphasize how great of a player Cam Newton was in his prime. What he did during the 2010 college football season at Auburn was nothing short of herculean. He and Nick Fairley largely carried a pedestrian Tigers team to an undefeated BCS National Championship. It is why the Heisman Trophy winner ended up becoming the No. 1 overall pick by the Carolina Panthers in the 2011 NFL Draft.

When Newton arrived in Charlotte, he had to help pick up the pieces of a season gone awry. Carolina was the worst team in the league, fresh off a 2-14 season quarterbacked by Jimmy Clausen. Yes, I think bringing in Ron Rivera as head coach over John Fox helped a ton, but no doubt about it, Newton was a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, he may have put himself ahead of his former teammates.

Newton's comments about Carolina while being on The Travis Hunter Show were a bit unbecoming.

“My issue is when I was the first pick, I went into a locker room of losers. Guys didn’t know how to win. Guys didn’t know how to prepare. They didn’t take themselves serious to realize, like, ‘Yo, we was 2-14.’ There was a lot of 2-14 in the mentality of those guys.”

It may have been a culture shock to go from SEC blue-blood to NFL cannon fodder, but this is not it.

“It was a culture shock for me. The games don’t mean a lot to a lot of people in the league like you would expect. It’s just money. Not everybody has capabilities to be impact players. They’re just players.”

Newton's comments ruffled the feathers of Steve Smith Sr., Charles Johnson and other teammates.

Cam Newton does not have a good rapport with his former teammates

Captain Munnerlyn, who had a career year in Carolina in 2010, had this to say about Newton's take.

“For him to say that we was losers was a slap in the face. This was a team who was two years removed from playing in the NFC divisional round against the Arizona Cardinals. We lost a couple pieces. We had Checkdown Jimmy Clausen at quarterback and we had a bad year. … For him to say losers was crazy.”

Jordan Gross, who was already one of Carolina's best players, had the following to say about Newton.

“There were iconic Panthers players when Cam got there. And you’d be foolish to say that he wasn’t a gigantic addition to the success of the organization when he arrived — also when Ron Rivera arrived. So there’s a pretty damn good argument that (Rivera) had a lot to do with it as well.”

To me, it feels like there were a special set of circumstances surrounding why the Panthers were so bad in 2010 and why it did not take very long for them to turn it around in the coming years. This was around the time of the NFL lockout, which compounded in making some of the league's worst teams struggle even more. Carolina did not have a quarterback worthy of starting for them the year prior.

Overall, there is no doubt that Newton, Rivera and countless others helped transform this downtrodden franchise into an NFC contender fairly quickly. From 2013 to 2017, Carolina was regulaly one of the best teams in the NFC South, a division that routinely sent multiple teams to the playoffs in a given season. Newton was must-see television and a pain to play every single weekend.

Ultimately, you have to be a bit more careful when entering the media world. Yes, people want to hear the truth from your playing days, but with that comes a certain responsibility. No matter how great you are or think you may be, you win and you lose as a team. Some players get more credit than others, but Newton would not have had the career he had in the NFL without his Panthers teammates.

Clearly, there are fences to be mended in Charlotte, but Newton has time to become an ambassador.