Patriots: Rodney Harrison has bold Cam Newton-Tom Brady take

Former Patriots safety Rodney Harrison had a bold claim about Cam Newton.

Free-agent signing Cam Newton has yet to participate in his first practice for the Patriots, but NBC Sports analyst Rodney Harrison is already convinced that the 31-year-old star has had a tremendously positive effect on his new teammates.

While we agree with that notion, Harrison quickly lost us when he unleashed a flaming take about New England’s quarterback situation.

The former Patriots star believes that Newton will help players forget about franchise legend Tom Brady, who, of course, stunned the NFL by signing with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this offseason.

“If I’m Devin McCourty and I just lose Tom Brady and all of a sudden in the offseason I’m like, ‘What the heck is this Jarrett Stidham gonna do?” Harrison said during an appearance on Pro Football Talk. “As a defense, do we really have to be the No. 1 defense in the league to win now?’ Then all of a sudden Cam Newton signs, you’re like, ‘Holy crap. We have a legitimate chance. Like, we can win this division.’ You automatically forget about Tom Brady and you feel like you can give yourself a really legitimate chance of winning that division and getting back into the playoffs and having success.”

Forget about Brady? The six-time Super Bowl champion that helped the Patriots morph from a notorious postseason choker — some would even say laughingstock before the late 1990s — into one of the most dominant dynasties in sports history? Forget about the quarterback that most players, pundits and fans believe is the greatest football player of all time? Give us a break. The guy led the locker room for 20 years!

We get that professional athletes are supposed to have short memories because roster turnover is simply part of the job, but Harrison declaring that Newton will “automatically” make (not help) New England think that Brady just fell off the face of the earth is preposterous.

Again, we aren’t saying that Newton won’t be well received in the Patriots’ locker room, but he definitely has some work to do as it pertains to winning over the respect, for lack of a better term, of the coaching staff and team veterans. That should be the consensus opinion as of right now.

We understand where the former Pro Bowl defensive back is coming from, but this take would have been better off being kept in the holster.