CAROLINA PANTHERS OFFENSE
QB Cam Newton
(on losing Super Bowl 50)
“They just played better than us. I don’t know what you want me to say. They made more plays than us, and that’s what it came down to. We had our opportunities. There wasn’t nothing special that they did. We dropped balls. We turned the ball over, gave up sacks, threw errant passes. That’s it. They scored more points than we did.”
RB Jonathan Stewart
(on how difficult the loss is after having a successful season)
“It’s real difficult. This is a big game. It’s the game you dream about. You don’t dream about it going this way. You dream about winning it.”
FB Mike Tolbert
(on Carolina’s offensive performance)
“They’re a great defense. So, I’m going to give credit to them, but us as an offense, we can’t do things. We can’t turn over the ball. We can’t give up the sacks. We can’t fumble. We can’t kill ourselves with penalties. That’s the thing; that’s the story of our offense tonight, and unfortunately, we picked the worst time to do it.”
WR Devin Funchess
(on if it is hard to even think about coming back after the offseason right now)
“I mean, we have emotions. We aren’t just people out there trying to entertain you guys. Of course it’s hard to deal with. Everybody wants to win. We have to tuck our heads on this one and congratulate Denver for winning the game.”
TE Greg Olsen
(on the team committing turnovers today)
“We picked a really bad day to kind of have a meltdown. … For as bad as we were playing in that first half and pretty much through three quarters – to look up and only be down one score, it was a credit to what our defense was doing. But we just could never really find our way.”
C Ryan Kalil
(On getting back here again and what the offseason plan is)
“I think it’s gonna be a couple days before we start thinking about that. You know this one obviously hurts a lot. That’s it, that’s all I got for you.”
Coordinator Mike Shula
(on his thoughts of QB Cam Newton’s performance)
“We weren’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. Offensively, we weren’t good enough. You don’t try to just single out one guy here or there. If I did it, I should lose my job – other than singling out myself because I’m the coordinator. This is the closest group of guys that I’ve ever been around. We worked so hard and I think probably all of us could’ve been better today.”
Head coach Ron Rivera
(on challenging Panthers WR Jerricho Cotchery‘s incomplete pass in the first quarter)
“Based on what I saw, I disagreed, and the answer I got was there was not enough comparable evidence to overturn. That, to me, seems like a hard thing to do. If they would’ve said that was a completion, it would’ve been a completion. Instead, he called it an incompletion and that’s what we have to live with.”