Newton finished the game 18 of 33 for 194 yards, and Benjamin caught six passes for 91 yards.
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Denver’s win over Carolina 21-20 with the nail biting field goal at the end that went wide left on Graham Gano, and the 10 point deficit comeback the Broncos over came; as fantastic as the game was as a whole, one aspect which cannot be shaken from social media nor ESPN, were the hits Cam Newton took to the helmet. Newton was shaken up and was limping on the sideline but did not miss any snaps in the game. “I just took the shot, man”.
The outcome of the game, however, was overshadowed by the fact that Panthers quarterback Cam Newton repeatedly took nasty hits to the head, only one of which was called (on an offsetting penalty, no less), and remained in the game.
One game into the season, the National Football League finds itself scrambling to explain why one of its marquee players was allowed to be abused by multiple head-shots without so much as a cursory examination for a possible concussion.
His teammates didn’t follow his lead.
“The NFL said in a statement Friday that medical personnel. reviewed video of Darian Stewart’s final-minute hit on Newton and ‘concluded there were no indications of a concussion that would require further evaluation and the removal of the player from the game'”. “We’ve talked about it ad nauseous”.
“Our doctor and the independent come together, and they go and look at it immediately on instant replay, and in this case this happened“, he said. The Broncos figure to ride Anderson in 2016, especially with so many questions left at quarterback.
“I think we knew we hard our hands full and it was going to come down to the wire with these guys”, Siemian said. “We’ve just got to treat Cam like a quarterback”.
Newton did go through the standard concussion protocol, but it wasn’t until after the game and before heading to the press conference.
That seemed to end when Newton was viciously sacked in the third quarter, enduring a helmet-to-helmet hit from Von Miller at the same time that DeMarcus Ware was slamming into Newton’s lower back.
After the game, a Panthers spokesperson, per the Charlotte Observer’s Jonathan Jones, said Newton was “getting some treatment”. The Broncos lost a few key defensive players, though they still have an impressive pass rush. “I don’t want to pass any judgment on that”. “We saw him limping throughout the game so that running stuff, you can’t do that all game”.
The punishment absorbed by the former Auburn star, including several helmet-to-helmet hits, led to questions about why Newton hadn’t been put in the NFL’s concussion protocol.
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“We hear (what) everybody says about us being dirty, but we’re not going to stop being aggressive”, Stewart said.
