Jay Cutler will leave the Bears, likely this year, as the best quarterback in team history.
He also will leave the Bears as the best example of a decade of disappointment that just completed a full-gainer into disaster.
Cutler will leave the Bears with all the important and gaudy passing records.
He also will leave the Bears as the hood ornament for shattered hope.
The special report we’ve put together examines the Bears’ precipitous and embarrassing decline, and any such autopsy worth its weight in cadavers must start with the McCaskeys.
Ownership has been the constant during this death spiral of a decade just like it has been the constant for the other two decades since the franchise’s one and only Super Bowl championship, a title that just turned 31 and is living at home in mom’s basement.
Whether it’s hiring team presidents, general managers or coaches, the McCaskeys regularly display a lack of institutional knowledge of the league that the family’s patriarch founded. Nice legacy.
But for eight of the last 10 years, Cutler has mirrored the McFailure.
He has symbolized it. Exemplified it. Typified it. Epitomized it. Pick a description and it fits.
I could be wrong, but I believe this makes him an adopted McCaskey.
Cutler will leave the team with a 51-51 record, as mediocre as it gets. Perfect: A .500 quarterback is all over the Bears record books.
A look at the 10 biggest Bears headlines of the past decade: the one each year that had people talking.
(Brad Biggs)
He also will leave the Bears with the copyright for strip-sack-score.
Cutler’s best season as a Bear in terms of passer rating was 2015, and it wasn’t significant because he was great. Because he wasn’t great. No, it was significant because he minimized his regularly scheduled awful, horrible, mind-numbing turnovers.
Cutler’s 2015 passer rating was 92.3, the best of his career. Aaron Rodgers, by comparison, hasn’t been that low in 10 seasons.
A passer rating in the low 90s is so-so. Nothing great. Functional. For Cutler, though, it reflected a rare spasm of ball security, the second-lowest interception percentage of his career. But again, just a so-so passer rating.
A great passer rating is 100 or better. Cutler has never reached that for a season. Never come close. Rodgers, by comparison, has surpassed 100 in eight of the last 10 seasons.
Cutler represents the Bears’ inability to solve the most important position on the team. Regime after regime tried everything, changed everything, redrafted everything, and the only thing left amid all the firings and cuts and wars with offensive coordinators was Cutler. Connect the dots, people.
Just like all the other great football minds, the interim regime of Ryan Pace-John Fox endorsed Cutler. Of course, Pace and Fox had no choice when they couldn’t trade Cutler. They seemingly held their noses while endorsing him, but they endorsed him nonetheless, and then committed an even worse personnel sin: They never drafted his successor.
Still haven’t.
Waiting. Wait. Ing.
On his first day, Pace said he wanted to draft a quarterback every year. He has yet to draft one.
But then, what would you expect from a guy hired by a McOwnership whose lack of leaguewide knowledge forces it to bring in a consultant to fill the top football position in a heritage franchise?
What this franchise knows about great quarterbacks is that there’s always one in Green Bay. If this franchise knows anything else about great quarterbacks, then it has been cheating off the student sitting next to it.
But you know what’s scary? Not that Cutler is the best quarterback in franchise history; it’s that the history of theMcOwnership and this GM-coach tandem easily could make us long for a return to the Cutler era.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
