Cam Newton shared a harsh reality about playing at Florida for two years before his Heisman-winning season at Auburn in 2010: Gators head coach Urban Meyer didn’t speak to him, leading the quarterback to believe that he wasn’t important enough to be spoken to.
“Urban was — he didn’t want to talk to me,” Newton said to Shannon Sharpe during the Club Shay Shay podcast (h/t 247Sports). “I wasn’t important enough for Urban to talk to me. And granted, you gotta think about it like this: Do you even have a voice to talk when the person you’re trying to talk about is the Heisman frontrunner? So I had a conversation with my father to say, ‘Pop, it’s time to kind of rethink this thing.'”
Newton painted a bleak picture of the behind-the-scenes in Gainesville that didn’t sound too dissimilar to the Billy Martin-era New York Yankees: plenty of winning despite endless in-fighting.
“That was a very toxic locker room where we still had success, but damn, it was a combination of a lot of talent that was boiling over,” Newton prefaced before saying, “There was times where it was just unmanageable. And then there was also times where it was a thing of beauty, where it was a competition every day, every practice.”
Dan Mullen tried to sabotage Cam Newton’s Auburn decision with allegations of taking money
Another former Florida head coach, Dan Mullen, gave Newton a lot more hell than Meyer did; in his case, by not keeping his mouth shut but rather blabbing untruths about Newton taking money from Auburn after choosing the Plains over his Mississippi State Bulldogs.
In fact, it wasn’t just Mullen who spread such rumors. Megan, his wife, was also part of the misinformation campaign to sabotage Newton after spurning Starkville for Auburn.
Newton made the decision of a lifetime choosing AU given how beloved he became after achieving the unthinkable in winning a championship, running the table, and elevating his game to the point of becoming the NFL’s No. 1 overall draft pick.