Confident.
Efficient.
So it wasn’t during Thursday night’s 19-17 preseason loss to the New England Patriots, in which the NFL MVP made bad throws, bad decisions and overall didn’t play well.
But afterward Newton showed the kind of maturity he wouldn’t have had, maybe couldn’t have had, three or four years ago. He showed an understanding for what went wrong in a way that that made you believe this truly was nothing to -- as he said several times -- push the panic button over.
Newton showed an understanding of the offense and what he should have done differently, starting with the first incompletion, which sailed high over the head of wide receiver Kelvin Benjamin.