WHAT’S WRONG WITH JAY CUTLER?

9/14/16

As Bear fans, cultural or otherwise, we have been endowed with an inalienable right to a lifetime of frustration.   Generally, the frustration is incessant; sometimes, it is broken by fleeting moments of glory, such as ’86.   Those brief periods of joy, however, ultimately serve only to intensify the pain of the mediocrity that is the lot of the Bear fan by teasing us with a mere taste of how enjoyable being a fan could be…and is to the people in such places as Green Bay, Boston, Denver, Seattle, and other less worthy cities.

Sometimes this frustration is a generalized feeling of pervasive mediocrity.  Sometimes, this frustration is more focused, more centered in one particular actor in the incessant miasmatic march that constitutes Bear football.   For the last ten years or so, while the futility has been quite widespread throughout the organization, it is quarterback Jay Cutler that has been the focus of our, er, discontent.

 Jay Cutler is Bear quarterback of the future for whom the future never seemed to arrive.  Now that he is 33, it is apparent even to those few die-hards he manages to retain in his retinue of enthusiasts that Mr. Cutler will never achieve the type of greatness that was always, somehow, just beyond his grasp.   The star of the future has become the “what might have been” of the past.

So what is the problem with Jay Cutler?

Some of Mr. Cutler’s most ardent detractors, and even a large measure of more objective observers, contend that he lacks talent, that he is, to put it bluntly, a lousy quarterback.   That this clearly is not true is apparent even to those of us whose eyes for the game are not as keen as those of the typical bleary-eyed overindulger in fantasy football and the like.   When Jay Cutler is good, he is very, very good.  Some of us, admittedly perhaps handicapped by a degree of insight less intense than that of more committed fans, would go so far as to say that, on his best days, Jay Cutler is as good as just about anybody playing quarterback in the NFL.

No, the problem with Jay Cutler is not lack of talent.   He can be a great quarterback and has been a great quarterback.   But he usually isn’t a great quarterback.   And that’s the problem:  for whatever reason, Mr. Cutler is horribly inconsistent.    One game, he looks like Joe Namath.   Then, for the next game, or seven, he looks like Jack Concannon.

That Mr. Cutler is inconsistent is no great revelation, except perhaps to those who, defying logic and the clear evidence, insist that Mr. Cutler is consistent…consistently crummy.    Why he is inconsistent seems to be the issue.   But why should we care why Mr. Cutler is inconsistent?   I am not a psychologist and, with a few exceptions, neither are you.    If I were that interested in Mr. Cutler’s, or anybody’s, psyche, I suppose I would have taken up such studies in college and pursued a career trying to figure out what, besides economics, religion, and sex, motivates people to do the things that they do.  However, as a non-psychologist Bear fan, I only care that Mr. Cutler is inconsistent; I care not a whit why.

A local pre-game commentator remarked last Sunday, referring to Mr. Cutler, that you can’t change a player’s DNA.   He is correct; we are stuck with Mr. Cutler’s peculiarities and inconsistencies…but not because of the immutability of his, or anybody’s, DNA.   We are stuck with Mr. Cutler because Bear management decided to

·         first, acquire a guy with Mr. Cutler’s eccentricities,

·         second, build a franchise around a guy with Mr. Cutler’s quirks and oddities, and

·         finally, sign a guy with Mr. Cutler’s peccadilloes to a contract that locks the Bears into him, at a pay package about as good as those given to people with much greater consistency, until 2020.

No, the problem is not with Jay Cutler.   He is not the future of the Bears, or of any team, for that matter.   He is an enormously talented guy for pitifully brief periods of time.   He would make a fine backup quarterback in the NFL and even a good starter with a team in Canada or perhaps a team satisfied to dwell in the cellar of the NFL.   And if he could have somehow extended his brief flashes of greatness, who knows where he, and the Bears, might have been?

The problem lies not with Mr. Cutler, but with the Bear management that made the mistake of placing the franchise, and much of the franchise’s budget, in the hands of such a tragically flawed athlete.  That Mr. Cutler is not, and was not, the future of the Bears didn’t become apparent this year, or last year, or the year before that.   But weak managements, and weak people, have a tough time admitting mistakes, especially big mistakes.   So instead of giving sunk costs their due years ago, dealing Cutler to another time, and moving on, Bear management signed Mr. Cutler to a contract that is the envy of all but a handful of NFL players.   Management pursued this ruinous course of action in order to avoid looking foolish.   They failed.