Auburn gave Newton 2nd chance

Auburn gave Newton 2nd chance
It was November 2008 when Newton, Florida's Tim Tebow Jersey-sized redshirt freshman backup quarterback, was in his dormitory room when suddenly there was a knock on the door. A swarm of police officers on an obviously slow night in Gainesville were on the trail of a hot laptop computer that was reported as stolen by a Florida student and traced to Newton because he was using his Florida student account to log on.
According to the police report, the computer was found in Newton's room, but Newton avoided the rush by asking police if they could wait outside a moment while he called a local attorney. When police returned moments later, the laptop was gone and they were not happy. The authorities later found it behind a Dumpster just outside of Newton's third-floor window.
Newton's toss was complete, but it got him arrested for buying stolen property and suspended from the football team.
"I believe that a person should not be thought of as a bad person because of some senseless mistake that they made," Newton, now Auburn's junior quarterback, said on a teleconference Monday to preview Saturday's 2:30 p.m. undefeated match-up of No. 6 LSU and No. 4 Auburn at Auburn. "I think every person should have a second chance. If they blow that second chance, so be it for them."
Newton, who is three inches taller than Tim Tebow Jersey at 6-6 and 10 pounds heavier at 250 and faster, could have had his second chance at Florida. The charge later was dropped after Newton went through pretrial diversion, and he could have returned to the Gators for the 2009 spring drills and season. But Newton, who was the No. 2 dual-threat quarterback in the nation out of Westlake High in Atlanta in 2007, and his father, Cecil, decided he had thrown his last pass at Florida after Tim Tebow Jersey announced he was returning for his senior season in 2009.
"I wasn't playing when Tim Tebow Jersey was a sophomore (in 2007) nor when he was a junior (in 2008)," Newton said. "So I felt like that if Tim Tebow Jersey was coming back for his senior year, I really wasn't going to get a chance to play. That was going to be another year washed down the drain."