John Noel William "Sam" Newman (born 22 December 1945) is a former Australian rules footballer who played for the Geelong Football Club in the Victorian Football League (VFL).
He apprenticed under Graham "Polly" Farmer, and became Geelong's main ruckman after Farmer departed at the end of 1967. He overcame a number of serious injuries during his career to become the first Geelong player to reach 300 senior VFL games.
After retiring in 1980, Newman served as a specialist ruck coach at various AFL clubs and had a notable media career, particularly with Melbourne-based radio station 3AW and the Nine Network as a panel member of The Footy Show, one of the network's most popular and often controversial programs.
Newman attended Geelong Grammar School, where his father was a teacher.
He made his debut for Geelong in 1964 when he was 18 years old. Early in his time at Geelong he acquired the nickname "Sam", by which he is now usually known.
After playing five reserves games for Geelong at the end of 1963, Newman was selected for his senior debut in Round 3 of the 1964 VFL season against Fitzroy at Brunswick Street Oval. During the first semi-final against Collingwood in 1967, Newman suffered a serious injury which forced surgeons to remove part of his kidney. He was also selected as an All-Australian player in 1969. He played for the Victorian state team eight times.
the 1980 season was Newman's last as a VFL footballer. In Round 4 against North Melbourne at Arden Street Oval, he kicked five goals playing as centre half-forward, four of those in the last quarter, in a 37-point win. Geelong coach Bill Goggin praised his former teammate after the match: "He is such an inspiration to the players. They have told me that just having him out there with them gives everyone a lift". Newman reached his 300th senior VFL game in Round 20 against Collingwood at Kardinia Park. Although he had a quiet game, the Cats achieved an 18-point win. As a point of note, sometime after the end of Newman's playing career, certain games were not recognised as official VFL/AFL matches and hence were removed from players' game tallies.
In 2002, he was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.
In December 2005, Newman was appointed as ruck coach for the Melbourne Football Club to mentor players such as Jeff White, Mark Jamar and Paul Johnson.
On 6 July 2010, Newman played in a charity match playing for Victoria in the annual E. J. Whitten Legends Game. He kicked four goals from four kicks and took three marks to be named best on ground, despite his team losing to the All Stars by seven points.
Newman joined radio station 3AW as a football commentator in 1981 and continued with the station until the end of the 1999 season. He also appeared on World of Sport on Channel 7 for seven years from 1981 to 1987 and had a column in The Sun News-Pictorial newspaper during the late 1980s.
Newman joined the Nine Network in 1989, appearing on a sports segment on In Melbourne Today with Ernie Sigley and Denise Drysdale. In 1992 he was a reporter on Melbourne Extra, a short-lived local current affairs show. He was a panel member of The Sunday Footy Show from 1993 to 1998.
Newman was on The Footy Show (the Melbourne-based version covering the AFL) on the Nine Network from when it first aired in 1994 until 2018. He also appeared on the Sunday sports show Any Given Sunday in 2005, and co-hosted the short lived Sam and The Fatman with Paul Vautin. On the radio station Triple M Melbourne, Newman previewed Friday night and Saturday afternoon matches. He formerly provided special comments during AFL games on Triple M, as well as 3AW. From April 2010, he was part of the Melbourne Talk Radio line-up, providing opinion and participating in talkback between 9.00 am and 9.30 am, during the Steve Price breakfast programme. Newman quit the station in January 2012, after the programme's producer censored Newman's profanity.
In February 2018, he started a podcast with former Herald Sun chief football writer Mike Sheahan and former St Kilda coach Grant Thomas, entitled Sam, Mike and Thomo. The podcast aired once weekly and covered all trending topics, with some AFL commentary. In March 2019 it was announced by Newman on social media that the podcast would be discontinued, as he was perceived to make fun of transgender people on a prior episode of the podcast. However, in August he revived the podcast, starring Sheahan and former VFL footballer Don Scott, entitled Sam, Mike & Don, You Cannot Be Serious. It aired with this name until June 2020, when Sheahan quit for a second time due to the fallout from comments made by Scott about former AFL footballer Nicky Winmar. It was then renamed to You Cannot Be Serious.
In December 2018, Eddie McGuire announced that Newman had signed a new multi-year deal with Nine; however, The Footy Show, on which Newman had been appearing with McGuire since the show started in March 1994, was replaced by a football show in a new format in 2019. Newman and McGuire were meant to host four Footy Show "specials" in 2019, but upon it being announced in May 2019 that The Footy Show would no longer be aired, this was cancelled.
In June 2020, Newman announced that he would no longer appear on the Nine Network.
In March 2023, Sam Newman announced on the You Cannot Be Serious podcast with Don Scott that their podcast had reached 10 million downloads on Podbean.
Newman has regularly been a controversial figure during his media career; some of his most controversial incidents on The Footy Show include: