Seahawks have history, home crowd on their side against Cam Newton

Panthers quarterback Cam Newton hasn't found much success in three regular-season games against the Seahawks, and now he's going on the road at a stadium where Seattle is 24-2 over the previous three seasons, including the playoffs.

BY DANNY O\'NEIL

Jan 8, 2015, 12:10 PM Updated: 12:24 pm

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Winless in three home games against the Seahawks, Cam Newton will now have to deal with the din of CenturyLink Field when Seattle and Carolina meet Saturday in the divisional round of the playoffs. (AP)

(AP)

RENTON – Unnerving.

That’s the word cornerback Richard Sherman chose to describe the experience for an opposing quarterback at CenturyLink Field.

“If you’ve never been here, never played here,” Sherman said, “I guess people can tell you a lot of things about how loud it is and how disruptive it is, but until you get out there at a crucial part of the game and you can’t hear and you can’t communicate and you can’t talk and you’ve still got to play at a high level, then really, there’s no way to feel it, to experience it.”

Cam Newton is going to find himself hip deep in that cauldron of decibels on Saturday night. He’s a quarterback who hasn’t found much success in three regular-season games against the Seahawks, and now he’s going on the road at a stadium where the Seahawks are 24-2 over the previous three seasons, including the playoffs.

Newton isn’t so much the key to this matchup as he is the Panthers’ only chance at pulling off an upset. As much as the Panthers like to run the ball with the combination of Jonathan Stewart, DeAngelo Williams, Mike Tolbert and Fozzy Whittaker, Newton is the guy that the offense isn’t just built around but catered to.

“Nobody else plays like them at all,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said, “because he has so many things that he can do so well. I don’t know about the past, but right now, we feel like we’ve got our hands full.”

He’s absolutely right. Newton is one of the truly dynamic players in this league, someone who has grown and evolved over the course of his four seasons in the NFL.

Cam Newton’s regular-season passing stats
Opponent	G	CMP%	YDS/G	TD	INT	RTG
Seattle	*3	54.1	145.7	1	1	70.6
Rest of NFL	59	59.7	237.1	81	53	86
*All played in Charlotte, N.C.

This is a guy who entered the league and threw for more than 400 yards in each of his first two regular-season starts. It was unprecedented. It was also unsuccessful. The Panthers lost both of those games, which was indicative of a season in which Newton passed for 4,051 yards – a single-season rookie record since broken by Andrew Luck – but his team won six games.

At that point, Newton had the look of one of those empty-calorie stat monsters. The kind of player who racks up big numbers for bad teams and never has that individual success translate to victories.

Well, he has passed for fewer yards with each season since as his team started to win more consistently. Well, at least he did until this season when Carolina needed to win its final four games to become only the second team to win a division title with a losing record.

Now, coming off the first postseason victory of his career, Newton is beat up, playing after suffering a back injury during a rollover car accident in December not to mention a sore ankle. But he’s the single biggest worry for Seattle this week and not just because he’s 6 feet 5, 260 pounds.

“He has been on the verge of making plays every game that we’ve had,” Carroll said.

The Seahawks will try to keep him in check for the fourth time in three years on Saturday night, only this time, they’ll be at home.