By now you are familiar with the fact that the Carolina Panthers have placed quarterback Cam Newton on season ending injured reserve. You know that he can, but probably will not return for the playoffs. You know that he has no guaranteed money and only one year left on his current contract. You know that the future for Newton in the Carolinas looks bleak.

If not, then the Charlotte Observer’s Tommy Tomlinson puts it terrifyingly concisely:

What you don’t know, what none of us knows, is how it really got this far in the first place. It is still unclear how Newton was cleared to play at the start of the season in the first place. He started the first two weeks of the regular season, which consisted of two games four days apart, just 17 days after he originally injured his foot in a preseason game against the New England Patriots.

His candid monologue about his injury after Week 2 included confessions that he was openly limping in practice and was unable to even jog around the stadium before the Los Angeles Rams game in Week 1. He called himself his own worst enemy, but where were the Panthers medical staff? Where were the coaches?

There is no responsible line of logic where Newton injures his foot that doesn’t involve the people in charge of the Carolina Panthers asking him to prove he can at least walk before playing him in an NFL game. It is indefensible for a head coach to take his star quarterback at his word that his foot is “fine” while he is limping in practice.

As a Panthers fan, I may never get over the idea of Cam believing himself to be his own worst enemy. Of course, he has to be a partner in his own health and the decisions about whether or not he can play. Of course, any player with his drive is going to say “put me in, coach!” It’s the job of the medical staff, the coaching staff, hell, it wouldn’t be out of place for the janitorial staff to say “yeah, but you can’t run.”

It is telling that taking time to get healthy inspired Cam to release a confessional video, as if prioritizing his health—a prerequisite for his ability to play—is a sin. He has never been his own worst enemy if the people who supervise his career have allowed him to operate with that attitude.

At best, nobody ever really asked him about his foot. At best, they simply overlooked the concept of following up on the injury to their most important player—the only player in franchise history to every be considered the most valuable player in the whole NFL. But of course that’s not the case.

They knew. They were in practice. We’ve all seen video of Cam in practice. Even when he is standing still he is running circles around everybody there. He couldn't run and I cannot say that enough. He could not run and they played him anyway.

Again, at the start of the 2019 season, Newton could not run. The public statements from the team at the time suggest they thought he was just fine and dandy. He. Could. Not. Run. And of course they knew. They knew because they only called one or two designed runs for him in two weeks. They knew because they took the ball out of his hands on 4th and one from the Tampa Bay two yard line with the game on the line. He could not run and the range of reasons why they didn’t acknowledge that gets no better than gross incompetence. I may think a lot of things about Ron Rivera, Marty Hurney, and their respective staffs, but I do not believe they are grossly incompetent.

That this comes just one season after Newton’s shoulder injury was mismanaged for weeks on, ostensibly, the strength of Newton’s desire to play through it is outrageous. At best, we are being asked to believe that Ron Rivera and his staff felt incapable of advising Newton to make decisions in the best interest of even his short term health.

This had better not be the end of Cam Newton as a Carolina Panther. If it is then it is an end written by men who were more interested in having their jobs than they were in being good at them.

Maybe that’s unfair. I don’t know if the coaching staff were overmatched by their circumstances or they simply thought playing Newton was the best way to save their jobs in the short terms. Maybe they took Newton at his word that he was okay to play because they needed him to be okay.

I sincerely doubt there was any conscious plan that accounted for Newton being harmed. These aren’t evil people. Whatever their rationale, mistakes were made. It’s a shame that they were the kind of mistakes that can end careers.