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NFL Winners and Losers: Cam Newton gets crushed. Again

The Carolina Panthers better hope Cam Newton really is the man of steel. He might not last the season otherwise.

Newton took a beating in the season opener and another on Sunday. He was sacked eight times by the Minnesota Vikings. Newton, under constant pressure, looked nothing like the NFL’s MVP. He threw three interceptions in a 22-10 home loss.

Everyone knew the Panthers wouldn’t win 15 games again, but they probably didn’t expect to surpass their 2015 loss total in the first three weeks of this season. Or to lose at home so soon this season, in just their second home game. The Panthers didn’t lose at home all last season.

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This doesn’t look like the same Panthers team that took the NFL by storm last year, though it’s still early. There isn’t as much celebration, though there’s not much to dab about when you’re 1-2. Newton has just five touchdowns and five interceptions after an all-time great 2015 season, and four of those touchdowns came against the San Francisco 49ers, the NFL’s version of a Triple-A team.

It wasn’t just that the Panthers lost to the Vikings, it’s how they lost. The offense, which was so good last year, was overwhelmed. The Vikings have a very good defense, but the Panthers have a very good offense. It just didn’t look that way Sunday. The Vikings were clearly the better team on Sunday.

“They were dictating to us, after they got the momentum,” Newton said.

The hits Newton is taking has to be a concern. The Denver Broncos pounded Newton in Week 1, too. Vikings defensive end Danielle Hunter blasted two Panthers linemen on his way to Newton, sacking him for a safety, and that summed up the Panthers’ protection issues Sunday. It also was a reminder that Newton could help out by getting rid of the ball.

Newton is a large quarterback, and is used to getting hit as a runner, but all those hits will eventually take a toll. Only 20 times in NFL history has a quarterback attempted at least 103 rushes in a season, and Newton has done it five times in his five NFL seasons. No matter how tough Newton is, that workload in the run game has to be shortening his career. He doesn’t need to take any extra hits when he’s sitting in the pocket. He gets enough through the Panthers’ play-calling.

The Panthers are only three games into a long season, and if Graham Gano would have hit a long field goal at the end of the Broncos game, they’d be 2-1. And the rest of the NFC South isn’t very good, so the Panthers should still cruise to another division title. But the Panthers have much higher hopes than a fourth straight NFC South title.

Nobody expected the Panthers to go 15-1 again. And it was clear that repeating as NFC champions would be very difficult, no matter how talented the roster is. But nobody expected the Panthers to be 1-2, either. It won’t get better until they figure out a way to keep their quarterback out of harm’s way.

Here are the rest of the winners and losers from Week 3:

WINNERS

T.Y. Hilton: It’s impossible to write a team off after three weeks in the NFL. However, the Indianapolis Colts were testing that theory.

If the Colts would have lost at home to the San Diego Chargers on Sunday, to fall to 0-3 with two home losses, it wouldn’t have looked good. But with their backs against the wall, Hilton might have saved their season.

Hilton said this week, after his quiet start to the season, “I guarantee I’ll make plays.” Did he ever. Hilton took a nice pass from Andrew Luck with less than two minutes remaining and the Colts trailing 22-20, spun out of a tackle and beat the safety to take it 63 yards for a touchdown. It was the type of clutch play a team needs out of its stars. It was the game-winner in a 26-22 Colts win.

Hilton had 174 yards and an enormous touchdown. If the Colts end up winning the AFC South, they can look back at his big touchdown as a turning point.

John Elway and Gary Kubiak: We see over and over how NFL teams fear the unknown at quarterback. They’d rather make decisions at quarterback they know are suboptimal, hanging onto mediocrity at any cost, because it’s the safe road.

Elway and Kubiak didn’t do the safe thing. They entrusted a little-known 2015 seventh-round pick from Northwestern, Trevor Siemian, to start at quarterback and defend their championship. It looks brilliant, especially after Siemian threw for four touchdowns in a 29-17 win over the Cincinnati Bengals and the Broncos improved to 3-0.

To be fair, they did not know all along that this is how the story would play out. The Broncos did try to pay Brock Osweiler a ton of money; he just took more money from the Houston Texans. And Denver moved up to draft Paxton Lynch in the first round, something they would have done if they had ultimate faith in Siemian. But Elway deserves credit for correctly scouting and drafting Siemian. Kubiak deserves credit for recognizing during the preseason he was the best option, although it wasn’t the safest route. Kubiak also deserves credit for calling an offense that allows Siemian to succeed, and Elway has done a great job putting a stellar team around Siemian.

Since Elway was hired to run the Broncos’ front office, they are 61-22 with five straight AFC West titles, two AFC championships and a Super Bowl win. Kubiak is 15-4 as Broncos coach. The first three games this season are a reminder that as long as Kubiak and Elway are in charge, the Broncos will be contenders.

Aaron Rodgers: Rodgers’ big day doesn’t retroactively make the 15 games that preceded it better than they were. The Packers did have an average offense. Rodgers hadn’t played at his usual MVP level.

But Rodgers showed Sunday that he can still be the most dominant player in the NFL.

Rodgers was tremendous in the first half as the Packers built a 31-3 lead. He had four touchdowns. Twice the Lions showed a blitz too soon before the snap, Rodgers read it each time and easily beat it for a touchdown. The Packers let up in the second half — maybe a little too much, as the Packers scored just three second-half points and the Lions cut the lead to a touchdown — but Rodgers still got 205 yards and those four touchdowns on just 24 attempts.

The Packers might not be totally fixed, though we saw again on Sunday that when Rodgers is right, they’re really tough to beat.

Hue Jackson and Terrelle Pryor: The Cleveland Browns lost, again, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.

Jackson did a heck of a job getting his team ready to play. A lot of his plan centered around using the insanely athletic and super-versatile Pryor, who has officially reinvented himself as an NFL player.

Pryor, the quarterback-turned-receiver, was quarterback and receiver on Sunday. He even lined up a play at safety, in a Hail Mary situation at the end of the first half. The Browns were down their top two quarterbacks so they mixed in Pryor there, usually taking advantage of his running ability. He’s the third player since 1960 to have 20 or more passing yards, 20 or more rushing yards and 100 or more receiving yards in a game. Pryor looked done for a while, after the Oakland Raiders gave up on him, but now he looks like a rising star.

Sunday’s plan almost worked. If the Browns hadn’t lost kicker Patrick Murray to an injury during Friday’s practice, they might have beat the Miami Dolphins (who looked awful and were very lucky to get an ugly win, but that’s a story for another day). Replacement Cody Parkey missed three field goals, including one at the end of regulation and the Dolphins escaped in overtime.

But this wasn’t a “same old Browns” day. Jackson had a fine day coaching them. Pryor is a great find. The Browns won’t win much this season, but Sunday wasn’t a bad day for them.

LOSERS

Blake Bortles: At some point, Bortles is going to have to play well in a close game. He has done that so rarely in his NFL career. Piling up meaningless stats when his Jacksonville Jaguars are getting blown out won’t cut it much longer.

The Jaguars, who spent a lot in the offseason and had some optimism, are 0-3. A lot of the blame should go on Gus Bradley, and it seems hard to believe he’ll be their coach in 2017. He might not be their coach by Halloween. But a lot of blame goes on Bortles, too.

In a 19-17 loss to the Baltimore Ravens, Bortles was bad. He completed 24 of 38 passes for 194 yards, two touchdowns and three interceptions. In a game the Jaguars desperately needed, Bortles barely averaged five yards per attempt and had three picks. He didn’t complete one pass longer than 20 yards. The Jaguars have plenty of problems, including questionable coaching and wretched offensive line play, but at some point Bortles has to play better. It’s his third season, and all he has on his resume are decent stats piled up in blowout losses.

The Jaguars had high hopes coming into this season, in part because of their young quarterback. Now the Jaguars are 0-3, and their young quarterback is a big reason they’re in that hole.

Manti Te’o: After so much hoopla before the draft, Te’o has had a good, solid (and pretty quiet) career for the San Diego Chargers. And his Chargers career may be over.

The Chargers, who seem to lose a couple players per week to major injury, fear that Te’o tore his Achilles tendon according to Michael Gehlken of the San Diego Union-Tribune. What makes it even worse for Te’o is that he’s set to become a free agent after this season.

“It was a big year for me,” Te’o said, according to Gehlken. “I worked extremely hard.”

It’s a tough blow for Te’o, one of the all-time great college linebackers who has had to endure years of bad jokes about the girlfriend scam he endured at Notre Dame. If he does have a torn Achilles, it’s a brutal way for him to go into an uncertain offseason.

Carson Palmer: Buffalo Bills coach Rex Ryan gets to save his job for a little while longer, thanks to how bad Palmer was on Sunday.

It’s a little more complicated than that, of course, and Ryan deserves credit for his defensive plan that shut down Palmer and the Arizona Cardinals’ passing game. But it wasn’t pretty for Palmer, and all of a sudden the concerns about him starting to fall off at age 36 begin again.

Palmer needed 50 attempts to get to 287 yards, and he threw no touchdowns and four interceptions in a 33-18 loss that wasn’t really that close. It was impossible to not think back to last season’s NFC championship game, when Palmer imploded.

The Cardinals aren’t dead at 1-2, but it’s not the start they were looking for. The way they plodded through a pretty miserable performance on Sunday wasn’t ideal. And now they need to worry about how their quarterback will bounce back from another terrible game.

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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!