The NFC playoff matchup Sunday of Seattle’s Russell Wilson and Carolina’s Cam Newton conjures, for some, images of breathtakingly gifted quarterbacks making something out of nothing by running with the football, zig-zagging around or bulldozing right over defenders.
And while that might happen at times in Charlotte when the top-seeded Panthers host the Seahawks, who are in pursuit of a third straight Super Bowl appearance, it doesn’t tell the entire story.
For Newton and Wilson, this season has been about their development into reliably productive pocket passers, making them complete quarterbacks with multiple means for disarming defenses.
Wilson was the league’s highest-rated passer during the regular season; he had a career-best passer rating of 110.1. The fourth-year pro had his first 4,000-yard passing season. He threw 34 touchdown passes and only eight interceptions. It was 24 touchdown passes and one interception in the final seven games of the regular season.
Newton was the seventh-rated passer in the NFL. He had 35 touchdown passes, 10 interceptions and a 99.4 passer rating. That was by far the best of his five NFL seasons; he’d never had a passer rating above 88.8 in a season before this year. His touchdown passes were a career high and his interceptions were a career low.
But there’s more to it than the stat sheet. Newton is the front-runner for the league’s most valuable player award in part because he did everything that needed to be done for the Panthers, who went 15-1 during the regular season and had a first-round playoff bye.
He got tough yards running with the football. He ran with abandon and seeming disregard for his own well-being when a key first down or a touchdown was needed. He was a vocal and demonstrative team leader, setting a confident tone with his charismatic celebrations of on-field success.
And he also stood in the pocket and delivered throws on time and on target to make a mostly unheralded Carolina passing game more productive than most observers expected or realized.
Newton and Wilson are making the transition that many knowledgeable observers say a young quarterback with running skills must make to achieve maximum success and longevity in the pro game.
It’s fine, they say, for talented quarterbacks to thrive early by relying on improvisational skills. But over time, the freelancing and the running must gradually give way to staying put in the pocket more often, understanding what the defense is doing, knowing where the ball needs to be and when it needs to be there, and reacting accordingly.
“He was a great athlete playing quarterback,” Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Theismann said of Newton. “Now he is a great quarterback who also happens to be a great athlete.”
The strides taken by Newton and Wilson are all the more impressive given that neither quarterback is working with a group of wide receivers regarded as particularly accomplished. Newton lost his top wideout, second-year pro Kelvin Benjamin, to a season-ending knee injury suffered in training camp. Wilson’s receivers often have been derided throughout the Seahawks’ run of NFC supremacy, with the team known more for its running game and defense.
That’s not to say that there isn’t talent around them. The Panthers had five other offensive players, in addition to Newton, selected to the NFC Pro Bowl team. Tight end Greg Olsen is a dependable pass-catching target and wide receivers Ted Ginn Jr., Devin Funchess, Jerricho Cotchery and Corey Brown have had their moments. Baldwin had his first 1,000-yard receiving season and tied for the NFL lead in touchdown catches during the regular season, with 14, for the Seahawks. But Baldwin was the only wideout on either team to reach 1,000 receiving yards this season.
“I just think that we’re playing great football,” Wilson said. “We’re so in tune. I think Coach Darrell Bevell and I are really in tune with one another, just throughout the week, just in every facet of the game.”
Indeed, Wilson’s remarkable passing statistics in the second half of the season coincided with the improvement made by his offensive line in pass protection. He was sacked 14 times in the final nine games of the regular season after suffering 31 sacks in the first seven games.
Wilson threw for only 142 yards in the Seahawks’ opening-round postseason triumph at Minnesota last weekend in a game played in frigid temperatures. His biggest play of that game was a throwback to his old ways. He mishandled a snap shotgun formation but raced back to pick up the football, moved around to buy himself time and delivered a pass to rookie wide receiver Tyler Lockett for a big gain that set up the game’s only touchdown.
The Seahawks, the NFC’s No. 6 seed in these playoffs, aren’t complaining about that. But they might need Wilson to regain his pocket-passing touch if they’re going to upend the mighty Panthers.