At Blinn College, Cam Newton Plotted a Return to the Big Time
BRENHAM, Tex. — Before Cam Newton won the Heisman Trophy, before he was drafted first over all, before he led the Carolina Panthers to Super Bowl 50, he woke up to mooing. The bovine alarm clocks grazed in a pasture, since built over, situated a deep spiral from his first-floor residence in Building 5 of the College Park Apartments here.
The cows’ stirring roused Newton for mandatory 7 a.m. sign-ins at the Blinn College football offices, before the 8 a.m. English composition and rhetoric course, for which he wrote narrative essays about football, and practices so intense that games were the easiest part of his week. He stayed late to polish routes with his receivers and then review every throw on film before returning to the complex or a friend’s room in Solons Hall to destroy all comers in Madden N.F.L.
There is, as Newton discovered in 2009, nothing glamorous about playing football for Blinn. The locker room is small, dank and outmoded. The bleachers at Spencer Stadium, which he and his teammates were once tasked with painting in the kiln of an east-central Texas summer, were deemed unsafe, and removed in 2010. The Buccaneers now play at Brenham High School. Basic equipment is issued, but if players want visors, gloves or wrist bands, they must buy them.
The modest facilities might have discouraged some recruits, and the town’s remoteness — the approximate midpoint of the 165-mile stretch between Houston and Austin along Highway 290 — might have deterred others. But isolation and humility are what Cecil Newton valued when he began plotting his son’s return to big-time college football.
Like many community colleges, Blinn is a haven for talented players who arrive as reclamation projects, sometimes after running afoul of the law or lapsing into academic troubles. They roll in and out of town every semester as if on a conveyor belt, regaining good standing in the community and the classroom in pursuit of Division I scholarships. Among the other Blinn players to make it to the N.F.L. were receiver Quincy Morgan, running back Bernard Scott and cornerback Chris Johnson, who won a Super Bowl with Baltimore.
Newton transferred here from Florida, where he had been arrested in connection with a stolen laptop and was facing another season backing up Tim Tebow. According to N.C.A.A. rules, Newton had to sit out a year before he could play for another Division I team. He arrived here without a car, a starting job or any immediate family within 850 miles.
“He had to come down to earth real fast,” said Chad Froechtenicht, a teammate of Newton’s and one of his close friends. “He had to say, ‘Hey, how did I get here, and what do I have to do to get to where I want to go?’ ”
Newton perceived Blinn, a two-year community college with about 2,400 students, as a 12-month stopover between quarterbacking gigs — if he could endure it. On weekends, when there were limited food options on campus and much of the student body had fled, Newton and friends who remained would head to Arby’s or Dairy Queen to flirt for food.
“Going back to small town U.S.A., you’re not under the big lights — that kind of slows you down a little bit,” said Ronny Feldman, who was Blinn’s offensive coordinator then.
The campus, studded with live oaks, pecan trees and crepe myrtles, is so contained that traversing it takes four minutes. It sits about a mile from the archetypal Texas town square — a courthouse in the middle, ringed by bakeries and boutiques and sundry shops — and is a seven-minute drive from the unofficial ice cream of Texas, Blue Bell Creameries.
“I don’t know what I wanted to get out of Blinn,” Newton said. “I think I just wanted that opportunity. When I was in junior college, I was mentally hurt. I needed to regain some confidence by playing the quarterback position, let alone football, because I hadn’t played important downs in so long.”
Newton had few other serious options. From the outset, his father homed in on Blinn, where its coach, Brad Franchione, had already won a national title.
The first time Cecil Newton called Feldman, Feldman did not recognize the area code and almost did not answer. What follows is an abridged version of their conversation, as recounted by Feldman.
Cecil: “Coach, this is Cecil Newton, Cam Newton’s dad. You know Cam?”
Feldman: “I apologize, Mr. Newton, but no, I don’t.”
Cecil: “That’s O.K. He plays at the University of Florida and he’s looking to transfer. Any way you could get some video?”
Feldman: “I probably can.” Pause. “Holy moly.”
A few weeks later, in early January 2009, Franchione met with Cecil and Cam Newton at a Houston restaurant and outlined his plan for academic and athletic success.
“You don’t get a second chance to do this right,” Franchione said. “I knew that, and they knew that.”
Over dinner, Cecil Newton made Franchione promise three things.
■ No interviews with the news media, which he upheld.
■ Franchione would develop Cam Newton’s leadership skills, which he did during daily discussions in his office.
■ And under no circumstances did Cecil Newton want his son to become an option quarterback. He would be a dropback passer.
At that early stage in the football calendar, coaches were permitted to oversee only conditioning and footwork drills, leaving players to organize anything involving a ball. After one workout, Franchione said, Cam Newton stopped in the doorway of the weight room, turned around and told the defense that he was headed to work with the receivers.
“Do you all think you can stop us?” he said.
Those types of challenges defined Blinn practices. Almost every day, Newton would bark at his teammates: “Did you get better today? Did you get better that play?”
They played tug of war with enormous tires. In each individual and team drill, the winners earned points for their unit; assistants kept score.
Within a few days of Newton’s arrival, about 60 players started accompanying him to the stadium for seven-on-seven games. But he still ranked second on the depth chart, behind Shaun Rutherford, who, like many players, knew little about their new teammate, who had thrown only 12 passes at Florida.
“When I first heard that we had a guy transferring in who was 6-4, 250 pounds,” Rutherford said, “I was like, that’s not a quarterback, that’s a defensive lineman.”
But Newton had earned the starting job by the beginning of the season. Feldman devoted those first few months to Newton’s passing fundamentals, to footwork and mechanics and progressions.
During two-a-day fall practices, Newton logged every route, pass, completion, drop and bad throw into a notebook and, in film study, reviewed them with his receivers. If the data suggested that he was struggling with a particular route, he would focus on it the next day. Feldman would consult Newton’s notes when scripting plays for that week’s game.
Newton demoralized opposing teams with his mobility and deflated them with his arm. He accounted for 38 touchdowns, including 16 rushing, while completing 60.7 percent of his passes and throwing only five interceptions. In one four-game stretch, Blinn outscored its opposition, 265-115, including an 84-13 rout of Cisco College that left the Buccaneers disappointed. They were hoping to score 90.
“That’s the thing I would say Cam brought to our team — confidence,” Rutherford said. “Cam brought that swagger.”
Newton, in turn, said his time at Blinn gave him “the confidence that I needed that I still carry to this day.”
He was known to stroll into huddles wearing a smile and saying something like: “Right now, we’re going to kick their butt. You with me or not?” When Blinn’s players dashed onto the field before home games, Newton often took a detour, running toward the far sideline to yap at the opposition.
Some teams called Blinn to complain about Newton’s antics, and Franchione is convinced that other coaches snubbed Newton from the all-conference team because they did not like him.
The former athletic director David Rehr said Newton impressed the administration during a meeting held, he said, “to see if he was apologetic” about the laptop incident “or if he was just another punk kid.”
After that, Rehr said, “Cam’s name never came across my desk.”
The only time Feldman grew upset at Newton, he said, came in the national title game against Fort Scott, when he punctuated a touchdown run by doing “that airplane jump” into the end zone, costing him a few series with an injured right shoulder. Returning to orchestrate a rush-heavy offense, he played the final snap of a 31-26 victory on defense, patrolling the goal line to thwart a potential Hail Mary pass.
The title, Blinn’s last in football, is commemorated on a scoreboard at a stadium where games have not been played in seven years.
Newton decamped for Auburn, where the next season he won another championship, but his legacy at Blinn persists: in the highlight videos that the new coach, Keith Thomas, shows to recruits and their parents; in the congratulatory social media messages the college has fired off to Newton and the Panthers; and in the athletes who choose Blinn because they see, or want to see, a little of Newton in themselves.
As a soft light bathed campus Sunday afternoon, two hopefuls ran sprints on the stadium grass. A few blocks away, at the intramural field that abuts a cemetery, another group practiced kicking field goals at the lone goal post.
As the sun dropped, a crowd gathered, about 25 in all. There is little to do in Brenham, Tex., but catch passes and defend them, the players changing, the cycle repeating itself. Then the players retreated to their dorms to watch Pro Bowl highlights and play Madden and go to bed so they could do it all over again.
@ Harrison's comments. That's such a cornball cliche thing to say. "Oh, the way I would really stop the superstar? I'm hitting him as hard as I can every chance I get." Genius strategy, bet you're the first person ever in history to think of that.
