CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Josh Norman is back in Carolina, and the personality splash he has made this week has already made the Panthers a more entertaining team.
The bigger question, though, is this: Can 35-year-old Josh Norman really help the Panthers win Sunday at Tampa Bay?
The Panthers hope so. The tentative plan isn’t to start Norman, but instead to activate him from the practice squad later this week and then let him play a specific number of plays off the bench at outside cornerback against his old foe Tom Brady. This is all necessary because now Panthers cornerback Jaycee Horn has a broken wrist and will definitely miss Sunday’s game and perhaps the regular-season finale at New Orleans, too.
In the meantime, Norman said he’s trying to process all that has happened to him over the past week. Norman has gone from working at the Omni Coffee & Eggs restaurant his mother owns in Atlanta — where he has done everything from sweep the floors to make the coffee to meet with business partners — to signing with the Carolina franchise that made him a fifth-round draft pick in 2012 and turned him into a star during the Super Bowl season of 2015.
“It’s crazy because in every room I have a memory here,” Norman said as he looked around the team’s locker room Wednesday. “Like an elaborate memory. ... This place grew me up.”
Never at a loss for words, Norman also said Wednesday that this week has been like “an out-of-body experience,” like “a dream or a movie” and like “riding a bike without training wheels.”
Norman has already had numerous reunions inside Bank of America Stadium, most notably with interim head coach Steve Wilks, who was his defensive backs coach at Carolina once upon a time. Wilks helped shape Norman into a Pro Bowler, and the two have kept in touch occasionally over the years.
“The guy has the wheel and I’m just a passenger on this ship,” Norman said of Wilks.
If you know Norman, you know it’s not in his nature to be a quiet passenger, either. Norman is a talker and an alpha male, and the Carolina defense needs another one of those in the locker room. It was Norman, remember, who fought with Cam Newton in training camp in 2015.
As Norman once told me of their relationship before that scuffle: “Cam’s a good guy, but we didn’t really talk. We had an admiring respect. A respect, like, a sniffing kind of respect. You know when two dogs sniff and they know what’s good and then they go their different ways? And don’t really play with each other? Like that. I just wanted to one-up him, and he just wanted to one-up me.”
After the fight, Newton and Norman quickly made up. But that sort of refusal to back down served Norman well as a cornerback, and maybe he’s got enough left to serve him well if he duels with the Buccaneers’ Mike Evans and Julio Jones once again on Sunday.
Wilks was cautious Wednesday when I asked him what kind of shape Norman was in, however.
“Well, he’s definitely not in game shape, I can promise you that,” Wilks said. “But he’s definitely in shape: The way he can move, plant, drive and change direction. So when you start talking about game shape, you’ve got to put a cap on the number of plays that he could possibly play.”
Maybe it’s 15. Maybe it’s 20. Maybe if either of the starting corners — C.J. Henderson and Keith Taylor — gets hurt or starts to get burned, it’s more than that.
Norman is now wearing No. 6 for the Panthers since Henderson already had 24. The reason? “Two plus four equals six,” Norman said.
Wilks said Monday of the decision to sign Norman: “He has experience in this league, he brings veteran leadership and, most importantly, I feel like he possesses our DNA. I know him personally, he played for me, he understands the culture that we’ve tried to create here and the element of play that we’re looking for.”
Although he’s now a decade older than he was when he started his first run at Carolina under Wilks, Norman’s confidence hasn’t changed.
“The skills have always been there,” said Norman, who was a fifth-round draft choice out of Coastal Carolina in 2012 for the Panthers. After the Panthers put the franchise tag on him and then rescinded it before the 2016 season, Norman then signed a massive deal with Washington. He has since also played for Buffalo in 2020 and San Francisco in 2021, but he hasn’t played anywhere in 2022.
Norman said he had been keeping busy by working at his Mom’s high-end coffee shop in Atlanta. Oddly, the cigar bar Cam Newton owns is less than a mile away.
“We’re business pals now,” Norman grinned.
Chris Floyd, the chief strategist for Omni Coffee & Eggs, said in a phone interview Wednesday that the place had opened its brick-and-mortar building in October in downtown Atlanta. It is Norman’s mom, Sandra Norman-Lemelle, who is the owner, Floyd said.
As for Josh Norman’s title?
“I’d say he’s our savant,” Floyd said. “He does anything and everything here and does it all well.”
Norman is taking a leave of absence from the restaurant now, though — one he hopes will extend into the postseason. He said of what he wanted to bring from the 2015 season to this one: “ ‘Keep Pounding’ was a thing. It was really like a mantra that stuck with us. … These guys have it. They just need to bring it out a little more this week.”
