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The Titans’ defense did a great job of shutting down Panthers quarterback Cam Newton in Sunday’s 30-3 win, and afterward they said that they could see they had gotten to Newton mentally.

“You could tell that he was getting frustrated,” Titans defensive lineman Jason Jones told Jim Wyatt of the Tennessean. “He was flipping the ball and doing stuff like that. As a defense, we wanted to keep getting in his head, man. Even when we didn’t get to him, we wanted to make sure he saw us. And that’s what we did.”

The Titans sacked Newton five times, forced him to fumble once, intercepted him once, and kept the Panthers’ offense out of the end zone. They also forced the Panthers to punt eight times.

Newton’s post-game comments suggest he was every bit as frustrated as the Titans thought he was.

“This is embarrassing,” Newton said. “This is as poor a performance as a team as I’ve ever seen, poor performance by myself. I know I could’ve done a lot of things better. We had more three-and-outs than I can even count.”

To be exact, the Panthers had six three-and-outs, and they also punted twice at the end of four-play drives. Newton knows other teams are going to be watching tape of the Titans to figure out how to shut him down.

“Whatever they did, it was effective,” Newton said. “In this league, this is a copycat league so we can best believe the next team we’re playing is going to watch this film and try and do the same thing, but this can’t happen again.”