Beyond Cams brother: Caylin Newton thrives as his familys underdog

WASHINGTON — The shades are drawn, but it is still stagnant and sticky in Brennan Marion’s office, where the air conditioner is broken. The Howard University quarterbacks trickle in, pulling out their binders and pens to take notes.

Caylin Newton takes his place in the center of the room, wearing a black T-shirt with a gray Under Armour logo on it, and slides on his feet. He stands 5 feet 11, six inches shorter than his older brother, Cam, and he later points out that he’s bow-legged. That’s part of the reason he ended up here in D.C. as a former walk-on at an FCS program, rather than as a scholarship player at an SEC powerhouse.

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Marion, Howard’s second-year offensive coordinator, begins the quarterbacks meeting by outlining the broad expectations he and head coach Mike London have for the position.

“You are the guy 24/7 as the quarterback,” Marion tells them. “You are the face of the program. You don’t get an off-day.”

Marion starts to go through his quarterback manual and how to operate what he calls his “Go-Go” offense. There are four quarterbacks in the room, including freshman Jemichael Jones, whose eyes grow larger with each passing minute. He’s put on the spot frequently, both to answer questions tied to the system he’s tasked with learning and to share his personal five-year goals. Jones is not sure what to say, exactly. Marion tells him to write down the following: I should have my degree. That’s a good starting point.

The other quarterbacks answer the same prompt. One wants, within five years, to be a starting quarterback at Howard and then get into Harvard’s business school. Another wants to be a great leader and a great man on and off the field, and a stock trader.

“Newt, what do you aspire to be?” Marion asks his star pupil.

Caylin Newton responds slowly and clearly. It’s something he’s given a lot of thought to. “First, a degree,” he says. “Be a Heisman candidate. The most impactful collegiate athlete in the history of college football. And then an entrepreneur.”

The goals are lofty and unapologetic. They help explain Caylin Newton beyond the simple identifier as Cam’s brother. They help explain the face of last year’s biggest college football upset and the engine behind one of the sport’s most unexpected turnarounds.

Caylin Newton grew up the youngest of the Newton boys, nearly 10 years younger than Cam and 12 years younger than Cecil Newton Jr. Some of his earliest memories were of watching his older brothers play football, both in the yard and later when they were in high school.

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Cecil Newton Sr. would give all of his sons tasks. He now refers to them as “obstacles,” meant to challenge his boys physically and mentally. “I don’t believe in a lot of idle time,” Cecil Newton Sr. says. The older ones would have to run a loop nearby or lift weights. Caylin would have to throw the ball to hit a particular tree 300 times or he’d have to throw the ball into the sky as high as he could and catch it.

Caylin Newton was too young to do the actual physical work his brothers could. Sometimes, he’d run around, just him and his imagination playing together.

“At the time, I really felt like an only child because they were so much older than me and I had to find a way,” Caylin Newton tells The Athletic. “I pictured myself as other football players outside in the front yard, just running around the front yard and picturing myself making plays. I used to picture myself as Jerome Bettis — a classic, I just saw toughness out of him. I used to watch Ray Lewis, and of course Michael Vick. Imagining myself making their plays. … The pavement was out of bounds. The trees were defenders. I had my own game going on.”

Cecil Newton Jr. grew into a center and played at Tennessee State. Cam Newton grew into a great high school quarterback, a can’t-miss prospect attracting interest from all of the elite college programs. Caylin followed Cam around town, happily accepting the nickname “Little Cam” because he often took on the appearance of his brother’s extra appendage. Still in elementary school, he didn’t mind the perception yet.

Caylin Newton rarely actually watched his older brother’s games in high school, though he knew what a big deal they were. He was just a kid, and he and the other players’ siblings preferred to play their own game, behind the fence on the side of the field. They’d play “Throw it up, bust ’em up,” which is exactly as it sounds: Throw the ball sky high, someone catches it, and everyone tackles that person.

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“He had his game, and I had my game,” Caylin Newton says. “It was kind of the unofficial daycare, I guess.”

Caylin Newton knew how talented his brother was. It made sense to him that all of the top schools and top coaches wanted to come and talk to Cam. He bragged to his classmates in middle school — “Dan Mullen is coming to my house, Urban Meyer is coming to my house …” — and his teammates would stare blankly back at him. “Who is that?”

“I knew how big of a deal it was because I imagined myself one day being in his shoes,” Caylin Newton says. “I remember Cam going to a Steve McNair camp. I wanted a signed ball, I wanted something with his signature. Just being so young and knowing those guys, it was humbling for me. It never was a dull moment. I always took it in. We would travel, and I would look forward to the end of the week, like on a Friday. We’d travel to Gainesville to see Cam or to Tennessee State where my oldest brother played.

“And it was all great for me, until it was like, ‘OK. I’m a football player, too. And my time is coming.’”

Shadows don’t disappear on their own. They’re only driven away by light.

For Caylin Newton, escaping his brother’s shadow would take quite some time. He may not be fully out from under it now, though he feels he’s writing his own story, one that includes Howard pulling off the largest point-spread upset in college football history in his first start, against UNLV last season.

This bright chapter in Caylin Newton’s life is marked by making the most of the unexpected.

Like, for instance, the fact that he ended up at Howard to begin with, as a preferred walk-on. That wasn’t what Caylin Newton envisioned for himself back when he dreamt of playing major-college football. When Division I coaches would come to watch some of his teammates at Grady High School in Atlanta, he couldn’t understand why they weren’t more interested in him.

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He knew a lot of it had to do with his size, and perhaps the guy he was subconsciously (or consciously) being compared to, who by then had been named NFL MVP once and reached the Pro Bowl three times as the quarterback of the Carolina Panthers.

“A lot of people would say I was starting because I was Cam’s little brother, and I’m like, ‘How does that make sense?’” Caylin Newton says. “Or people would be jealous. Who knows why? But it was always something. Or, ‘Why don’t you have more offers because you’re Cam’s little brother?’ or ‘Why are you not getting picked by the big schools?’ It was always something. ‘Why is Cam 6-5 and why are you 5-10?’ ”

Says Cecil Newton Sr.: “I constantly reminded him and the people around him that he’s not Cam. Caylin endorsed that idea himself. He wanted to be unique and independent in his approach to the game and his life. While he loved and supported Cam, and Cam supported him and helped coach him up, Caylin really never struggled with wanting to be Cam.

“Too many times, you see with professional athletes that people assume that their little brother or sister is going to follow directly in their footsteps. It doesn’t really happen. You’re trying to cheat the kid out of his own identity when you say stuff, like, ‘Cam would have done it this way.’ I never let that happen.”

In the first game of his junior season, Caylin Newton made a spin move that went viral. He could feel the hype building just at the right time to attract interest from bigger schools that might be curious about the youngest Newton. Then he broke his wrist on the first play of the next game.

Caylin Newton attended a number of camps, and he put up impressive numbers as a senior at Grady High School: He threw for 3,322 yards with 33 touchdowns and eight interceptions while rushing for 1,036 yards on 92 carries with 13 touchdowns. But no FBS offers came.

Quarterbacks who were bigger, stronger and taller collected those. “That’s supposed to make you a better player, supposedly,” Caylin Newton says. He points to his height and frame — 5-11, 185 at this point — as well as the fact that he was bow-legged as reasons he thinks bigger programs weren’t willing to take a chance on him. “Bow-legged like me? I haven’t seen that, playing at a high level,” he says, standing up to show his stance.

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He explains that he has Blount’s disease, a growth disorder of the tibia that causes the lower leg to angle inward. He first noticed this when he was about 12 or 13, when kids his age started to have their big growth spurts. He had two procedures a few years later, pins inserted to try to help correct the angle and the growth plates, anything to help alleviate pressure on his joints and his hips. Another doctor tried to suggest a more severe surgery, with a year’s recovery time, but the Newtons opted against it.

The quarterback everyone thought was too small and too skinny, the one with a different walk, collected scholarship offers from Hampton, Kentucky Christian, Texas Southern and Savannah State. People would ask him if he would go to Auburn, like Cam, and he’d tell them he couldn’t go somewhere he wasn’t offered.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” Caylin Newton says. “I was confused. I was hurt. Mentally I was drained, because I gave my all to the game. So much had led up to this moment in time. During this period, I felt pressure. Embarrassment. In a way it was almost like a movie; that’s what I picture it as. Everyone’s going with the flow, and you look back and it’s like, just me.”

Cecil Newton Sr. had gone to Savannah State University, an HBCU. Cecil Newton Jr. had gone to an HBCU, too. Soon, the Newton family patriarch was looking at Howard.

“He was looking at excellence,” Caylin Newton says. “He was looking at, ‘At this time in your life, you’re a good ballplayer, son. Cam has already made it to the NFL. We’re going to need a businessman.’”

He smiles.

“I was just swept up under the system,” he says. “I was a good player who didn’t get the opportunity, but he was looking at it as, ‘How do we give you this opportunity?’”

Cecil Newton Sr. would remind his youngest son that he was not dealt the hand that Cam was, that he was not 6-5, 225 pounds in high school. Caylin Newton would have to accept the skill set he had and the knowledge of the game he’d absorbed over the years.

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“We weren’t angry about it. We weren’t bitter about it, ” Cecil Newton Sr. says. “We’re not going to cry about that.”

He zeroed in on the major HBCU programs by the start of Caylin’s senior year, figuring out how his son could get his academics together to graduate early and make it happen.

“People wanted me to wait,” Caylin Newton says. “I’m like, ‘Wait on what? I don’t have to wait.’ I was big on pride. My dad was big on pride. I call him LaVar Ball before LaVar Ball. Because I mean, he just had that confidence. He knew. He had a plan, and he trusted in it.”

Mike London landed the Howard head coaching job after Caylin Newton had enrolled in January 2017. London left Maryland after just one season as the associate head coach, which followed six seasons (and a .370 winning percentage) as the head coach at Virginia.

One of London’s first calls was to Cecil Newton Sr., who told him right away that outsiders probably would make comparisons between his sons, but that Caylin Newton was his own person and also a great athlete. London met Caylin Newton in person soon after, as did Marion, Howard’s new offensive coordinator.

Marion had been surprised to see Caylin Newton again. He was the first person to offer him a scholarship, when he coached at Kentucky Christian. He had wondered why so many others had overlooked the quarterback and didn’t know he had ended up at Howard.

“They didn’t really tell us about him because he was just a walk-on,” Marion said. “We put him on scholarship that spring. Yeah, he deserved that scholarship.”

That Marion and Caylin Newton would come together and produce a freshman campaign for the history books felt fated. Marion played wide receiver at Tulsa when Gus Malzahn was the associate head coach and co-offensive coordinator. He grew up in Malzahn’s version of the spread offense — the same offensive system that Cam Newton won a Heisman Trophy playing in under Malzahn at Auburn.

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“I told him, ‘This offense has changed your family’s life,” Marion says. “ ‘This is the offense I played in, and it changed my family’s life. You’ve at least seen what it takes if you’re the quarterback in this offense and you can run things and see what can happen.’ We just have that quiet confidence in each other knowing that. I don’t think a lot of people really believed in what was about to happen and what could go on with him being our quarterback.

“The rest is history.”

Marion didn’t care about Caylin Newton’s size. Marion pushed his quarterback in the spring — particularly hard after a tough spring scrimmage in the rain — to become the student of the game he knew he could be.

Marion figured out how to harness the energy that Caylin had, how to use those slights the quarterback had dealt with all his life as motivation. Marion wanted Caylin Newton to believe he could take aim at records that Steve McNair set at Alcorn State in the mid-1990s.

“The light bulb clicked on,” Marion says. “Everybody wants to achieve certain things, and when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s like, ‘Oh man, I can keep this up and get better.’ You can be on par with the experiences you might have had elsewhere. He can do that here.

“I would tell him the big time is wherever we’re at. At first, he’s looking at me like, it’s Howard … but his dad was telling him the same thing. If you have a few people you really believe in and trust telling you the same thing, then you start to see it. And then, it’s the biggest upset in college football history, Game 1.”

On Sept. 2, 2017, Caylin Newton accounted for 330 total yards — 190 on the ground and 140 through the air — and three touchdowns in Howard’s 43-40 win at UNLV. The Bison were 45-point underdogs entering the game, and they’d never beaten an FBS team.

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“I knew he had the competitive nature of a champion, but I didn’t know it was gonna be unveiled as a true freshman,” Cecil Newton Sr. says. “I knew he was gonna compete because I built him to compete and not ask for something to be given to you. I think that kind of dumbs down the level of competition, when you give people stuff that they don’t earn. That’s in the corporate world, that’s on the athletic field, wherever.”

Caylin Newton earned that start, and the 10 that followed. He continued to push himself to get better. He took pride in being part of Howard’s resurgence.

“He’s got legs like a wishbone, and he’s not 6-5 like his brother,” London says. “But he’s got the heart of a giant and a leader.”

Howard finished 7-4 last season, an impressive achievement on the heels of the program winning three games total in the two seasons before. Caylin Newton became the first MEAC freshman to account for 3,000 total yards in a season; he also had 25 total touchdowns. He was named the MEAC Rookie of the Year. Marion’s “Go-Go” offense was the most prolific in the MEAC, and the Bison finished No. 13 in the FCS in total offense (446 yards per game).

“He had to make a lot of plays,” Marion says. “We wouldn’t have won half those games if he wasn’t the quarterback making plays. You know, at this point, if you’re still trying to find a way to discredit him, I don’t even know what to tell you. It’s still confusing to me that people are like, ‘What’s he gonna do now? He’s so bow-legged.’ ”

Caylin Newton has big plans for what he wants to do next. He spent most of the offseason juggling classes, football practice, late-night film sessions with Marion and, for six weeks this summer, a global marketing internship at Under Armour. He’s also made it a point to speak to African-American kids at local middle schools and youth groups, encouraging them to follow their dreams and someday go to college.

Caylin Newton has improved his accuracy as a passer and his understanding of the offensive philosophy itself. He’s been quizzed over and over on when to pull the ball, when to give it and how to make the throw when he needs to. He’s been reminded that Baker Mayfield, who’s nearly the same size, got drafted because of his talent and not because of his height. He’s been reminded to avoid taking hits, avoid taking hits, avoid taking hits … but if there is going to be contact, to “be the hammer, not the nail.”

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The 2018 season nearly started with another upset. Last Saturday, as a 31-point underdog against preseason Mid-American Conference favorite Ohio, Caylin Newton passed for 439 yards, rushed for 93 yards and accounted for four total touchdowns in a down-to-the-wire 38-32 loss. This Saturday, the Bison will get another chance to upset an FBS team from the MAC in a game at Kent State.

“The game has slowed down for him,” Marion says. “He can actually call the plays himself now, where it’s not just looking at me and relying on me to give him everything. Any great quarterback that’s out there that has played professionally or whatever is calling the plays the majority of the time by themselves.

“We’re going to give him a lot of freedom to make some plays.”

Says London: “That will even speed the offense up even more. … When you have a guy like Caylin touching the ball 100 percent of the time, that makes it special.”

Some of that is because of his particular skill set, the explosiveness, the agility, the ability to make defenders miss. But mostly it is because of Caylin Newton’s leadership, and his confidence in himself and his teammates. He could bring them all under the spotlight he has created for himself, one that had little to do with Little Cam and everything to do with Caylin.

“Speaking things into existence,” Caylin Newton says. “I could say things, and it actually happens. This whole year was like, I can compete with the Baker Mayfields of the world, or the Lamar Jacksons of the world. I can compete at a high level and have the same notoriety as those players, put up the same numbers and be just as good.

“They may have better food. They may have better facilities. But I’m in the moment, and I’m just taking in the moment.”

(Top photo of Caylin Newton: Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

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