Why Cam Newton hater is (probably) going to break his promise

There are a fair number of Carolina Panthers fans out there who have fantasized for years about seeing Jim Folsom in his tighty-whities.

That’s because, back in 2011 – shortly after the team bet the farm on Cam Newton by making him the NFL’s No. 1 draft pick – Folsom tossed this very-live grenade onto the very-unforgiving Internet:

“Cam Newton is a sure-fire bust,” he wrote in an opinion piece for the Bleacher Report website titled “Why Carolina Panthers’ New QB Is the Worst NFL Draft Pick Ever.”

“I am so certain of this,” Folsom continued, “that if he is the Panthers’ starting quarterback in 2016, I will buy a Cam Newton jersey and stand in the stadium parking lot in my underwear when the Panthers come to Tampa Bay and hold a sign proclaiming that Auburn rules over Florida and Carolina rules over Tampa Bay.”

Folsom went on to make a litany of other inflammatory statements, including “Cam Newton is no brainiac,” “He has no credibility; his word means nothing,” “Cam cannot hit the broad side of a barn with a football,” and “In five years, when ... Cam Newton is riding someone’s bench, remember this article.”

Oh, Panthers fans remember this article, all right. And it’s the underwear part they’ve stayed stuck on.

Well, guess what? Despite the fact that, yes, Newton is not only the Panthers’ starting quarterback but also the odds-on favorite to win his first MVP title, Folsom has a message for those who have demanded he make good on his promise: Kiss my you-know-what.

“I’ve been putting up with Panthers fans calling me, and texting me, and threatening me, and talking (expletive) about my family, and how they’re gonna come down and kick my a-- ... for five years,” Folsom told me this week by phone from his home outside of Jacksonville, Fla. “I never said anything about coming to Charlotte. If they want me in Charlotte, they are gonna have to break open the piggy bank, because I am not showing up there for free. If people think I’m a (expletive) for that, that’s fine – I don’t care.”

Wait. Huh? I mean, what kind of journalist talks to another journalist like this on the record?

Just one thing, though: Folsom, 51, isn’t a journalist, by training or by trade. He’s just a regular old sports fan. (“That’s why the site is called ‘Bleacher Report.’ ”)

He says he had recently been laid off from his job as a sales rep for a construction company in Florida when he started contributing columns to Bleacher Report. He says the site “wanted somebody to write about why Cam Newton was gonna be a draft bust,” and he volunteered.

Folsom in fact wrote a similar but less-incendiary (and far less-circulated) column criticizing Newton for the site one month earlier, pre-draft. But after the Panthers picked the quarterback, Folsom says his Bleacher Report editor told him: “You need to rewrite it and make it a bit more controversial. Actually, you need to make it a lot more controversial.”

So he did, and the thing went viral.

Long story short, Folsom says he has since parted ways with Bleacher Report and has “never seen a nickel” for any of the hundreds of pieces he says he wrote for them. (Multiple email queries submitted to Bleacher Report’s media contact were not returned, but the site has a reputation for exploiting its contributors.)

The only way he’ll make good on his promise, he says, is if Bleacher Report or Panthers fans pay for his travel from Florida to North Carolina. “All it takes is a couple bucks and a postage stamp. Do your thing. But not one of them has done a thing. So don’t give me this crap about ‘You don’t have the guts to show up.’ I got the guts to show up. You guys don’t have the guts to make me show up.”

Meanwhile, not surprisingly, he’s been roasted by the Internets and on Twitter as the Panthers have dominated this season.

Bleacher Report still has his profile on its site, and it allows comments on profiles. Here’s just one of many: “In 9 months, when Cam is the starting QB for the Carolina Panthers in the Fall of 2016, this tool will still not admit he was ever wrong. But then, that would be a far more accurate prediction than anything this moron could come up with.”

A Change.Org petition titled “I would like to see Bleacher Report hold Jim Folsom accountable” has collected 450 signatures.

Even North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory used Folsom and his infamous column as a punchline – while taking a dig at his own critics – on Twitter in November: “Remember articles like this when the media starts offering their opinion on things.”

We could fill a few hundred binders documenting the avalanche of fury and vitriol against Folsom, but it’s pointless. The bottom line here is: Keep dreaming if you want to see Folsom in his skivvies on Mint Street.

Oh, and keep dreaming if you’d like him to feel the least bit contrite. (In the past month, he’s written columns for The Badassitude Blog with headlines such as “Bravo to Cam Newton! The MVP of 2015!” and “Alabama Fans Owe a Debt to Cam Newton,” but they’re both rather backhanded compliments.)

“To tell you the truth, I was right (about Newton) until he had the truck accident,” Folsom says, referring to the star’s scary December 2014 crash in uptown Charlotte. “When he was 3-7-1 and throwing picks like crazy and taking sacks like that Philadelphia game last year, there’s a lot of teams that would have benched him right there. Then the guy ... got a wake-up call and he had the good sense to realize, ‘This is a pretty good deal I got, and I don’t want to blow it.’ And he’s changed since then. Great. That’s fantastic. ... But five years ago, I had no idea the guy was gonna flip his truck and have an epiphany and go from mediocre-to-bad quarterback to Superman in one day.”

There’s lots, lots more, but you get the idea.

Now, I was going to wrap this up with my own promise to do some sort of outlandish thing, as a joke, but I thought better of it.

Instead, I’ll just say this: Whether you’re a politician or a plumber, if you’re ever feeling bold enough to publicly tack a big promise onto a know-it-all prediction, before you do, remember this article.

This story was originally published January 8, 2016 at 11:05 AM with the headline "Why Cam Newton hater is (probably) going to break his promise."