A while back I wrote everything I thought about Jay Cutler into a single column, hoping at that time to never find need to speak on him again. I should have known better. Last week Jon Gruden opened his word hole (to call it a mouth would be an insult to mouths) and leaked out a tidbit that restarted The Great Cutler Debate in newspaper columns and on radio airwaves.

From the Sun-Times:

“I think John Fox is going to look at the body of work,” Gruden said. “They’re going to see that he didn’t get it done really with Lovie Smith or Marc Trestman, and now I’m the next head coach. I think you need to give some other people an opportunity to play. I think some of these quarterbacks get too many chances. There are good enough players out there that deserve a chance to be the quarterback of the Chicago Bears.”

“I know he has talent,” Gruden said. “But I don’t think he warrants that salary for sure. I think Chicago needs to look at getting a different leader under center.”

In all of the articles citing this quotation, it should come as no surprise to you that few if any of the journalists thought it wise to draw the personal connection between Gruden and former Bears head coach Marc Trestman. The two men not only had very obvious overlaps in their professional careers but are also known to be close friends. Did anyone really expect Jon Gruden to answer Cutler questions with, “Trestman was a nightmare. Cutler’s performance in 2014 was no worse than the rest of the organization.”

Also, who are these “good enough players” deserving the chance to be Bears quarterback? Why don’t the Browns and Bills and Titans and Jets have them? Gruden, unsurprisingly, is wrong.

The truth is I don’t care anymore.

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As many of you know, this is not the place to come for draft analysis in February. I will write about the draft EXTENSIVELY for the two weeks prior to the draft. There is no more than that required if you’ve watched ALL of college football for four months in the fall.

• Matt Forte Tweeting about a perceived lack of commitment from the Bears organization is telling. Someone in his camp got wind of the Bears mentioning him in potential trade deals. If they didn’t we are meant to believe Forte, a seasoned vet, is lashing out emotionally on social media because of erroneous blog reports. If the Bears can trade Forte – with only a year remaining on his contract – they should do so. Of course they have to get something for him but if they have no intention of retaining his services beyond 2015, what is the point of not accepting a mid-round pick for him this coming month?
• Seems the new Bears brain trust respects the work of the old Bears brain trust. Signing of both Hurst and Louis-Jean to two-year extensions signals to me, once again, Phil Emery is no longer running the Bears for one reason: he hired Marc Trestman.
• Josh McCown is set to make his decision on landing spot over the next few days and I’m hoping he chooses Chicago. I then hope the Bears make an announcement that Cutler and McCown will battle for the starting gig in training camp. Will Cutler win that competition? Of course. But it will send the message to Cutler that he can be replaced at any point in the 2015 campaign by a player who has the confidence of the coaching staff and respect of locker room.

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FOX

• John Fox was noncommittal on the future of Jay Cutler. He was asked point-blank if Cutler was his quarterback moving forward and balked. It is February 18th. We are less than a month from free agency. How many teams with a “franchise” quarterback would not endorse him as the starter today? Yes it’s possible Fox does not have enough information on Cutler to this point but what exactly is he going to learn between now and free agency or the draft? Will Cutler have an opportunity to blow Fox away at OTAs? Will the Bears be willing to risk millions of dollars on that development?
• Fox made is quite clear that if Brandon Marshall will be on the Chicago Bears in 2015 he will not be on Inside the NFL. His money quote: “Our focus needs to be on football.” This is a drastic departure from the previous head coach.
• The Bears are switching to a 3-4 base for all you 3-4/4-3 junkies out there.
• Fox knows he is taking over a defense lacking in talent. When pressed about building blocks on that side of the ball he struggled to mention anyone other than Kyle Fuller.
• Fox started to get frustrated during his short presser with the number of ways the press asked him the EXACT SAME question about Cutler. This wasn’t on the Chicago media. This was on the whole of the NFL media attending this moronic event.
• The Bears want Josh McCown back in Chicago. McCown fits to a tee the type of quarterback Fox has utilized in his first year with a team needing rejuvenation: limited ability but  great leadership qualities. If the Bears are targeting a quarterback in this draft (or a young player at the bottom of somebody else’s roster), McCown is a far better choice to help groom that young talent than Cutler.
• Seemed to be little desire on Fox’s part to leave door open for Lance Briggs and Charles Tillman to return.

The takeaway…

On offense, Fox has to determine whether his supremely talented quarterback and receiver fit in with the locker room he’s trying to build. On defense, Fox has to find players. He doesn’t have many now.

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I remember all too well the refrain among Bears fans (including myself) last offseason: the Bears finished 2nd in scoring in 2013.  They have an elite offense, and just need a defense to be competent to be really good.

Then 2014 happened, and the offense was far from elite.  They finished 21st in yards and 23rd in points.  The defense didn’t exactly return to competency like hoped, but this post is focusing on the offense, so let’s stick to that.

Former general manager Phil Emery built the roster around the offense.  That isn’t to say he ignored the defense (contrary to popular belief, he didn’t), but his ideal was to build an elite offense that was stacked with playmakers at every position.

Fatal flaw

Here’s the problem with that approach: the Bears don’t have a high enough caliber of quarterback to consistently have a top-shelf offense.  This is not to say Jay Cutler is a bad quarterback (he’s not), but history shows only teams with top-shelf quarterbacks can count on consistently having top offenses.

Looking at the last ten years, only 6 quarterbacks have guided offenses to top 5 scoring status more than twice in that span: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Tony Romo, and Aaron Rodgers.  That sextet has combined for 35 of the 50 top 5 scoring offenses over the past decade.  Outside of that group, only Eli Manning (2) has guided more than one top 5 scoring offense in the last ten years.

Trying to build your team around the offense without a top-level quarterback is a fools’ errand that will never succeed. You could easily argue building your team around any one side of the ball is a fools’ errand that won’t lead to titles, but that’s another story.

Teams with great offenses (which need great quarterbacks) can routinely drag poor defenses into the playoffs, but they will fall short of a championship.  But teams with only good quarterbacks cannot follow that route, which means that the Bears were doomed to fail before the 2014 season even started.

Culture changing

Fortunately for Bears fans, Chicago’s moves this offseason signify a clear re-focusing on defense.  They hired a head coach with a defensive background and track record of quality defenses, then went out and signed the best defensive coordinator on the market in Vic Fangio.  A new influx of talent is needed, but there is little doubt in my mind the Bears will be back to fielding a quality defense again within a few years.

Thankfully, I do not expect the offense to be ignored and sink back to Lovie Smith-era levels either. The Bears hired a well-respected offensive coordinator in Adam Gase, and the offense is still stacked with talent.  Based on the trends I talked about above, I do not expect Chicago’s offense to consistently be a top 5 unit, but the top 10 should be attainable in 2015, assuming they don’t cut or trade away key personnel.

Until they find a top quarterback, the Bears won’t consistently have a top-tier offense, but the good news is they shouldn’t need to.

…DaBearsBlog salutes the Bill Swerski’s Superfans – the greatest sports sketch in the history of television and the namesake of this website. Saturday Night Live’s connection to Chicago, its deep-rooted ties to Second City, are undeniable. It is just as much Chicago’s show as New York’s. Sunday night the show celebrates its 40th anniversary and DBB celebrates about 22 of the 40 years with rapturous applause.

“If only our guys had stayed healthy.”

This common lament from NFL fans at the end of a disappointing season reflects the harsh reality that injuries are an unavoidable part of football.  I don’t particularly like using injuries as an excuse, but there is no denying that the health (or lack thereof) of certain key players can have a dramatic impact on a team’s fortunes in a season.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take a look at how the Bears were affected by injuries in 2014.  When I do this study, I examine four different metrics.  No one of them is perfect , but together they should give you a pretty good idea of how badly the Bears were impacted by injuries.  Before we get to the numbers, let’s take a minute to briefly explain each method.

Procedure

The first metric I examined was games missed due to injury.  This simply counts any time a player on the roster is ruled inactive for a week due to an injury.  This is useful for seeing how much injuries impacted the roster as a whole, but completely ignores the value of a player.  A superstar quarterback missing a game means a lot more to the team than a fringe roster player who only plays on special teams, but they both count the same here.

The second metric, therefore, is starts missed.  This looks only at games missed due to injury by players expected to be starters with a fully healthy team (so the standard eleven on offense and defense, plus a third wide receiver and cornerback).  This helps distinguish in player value a little bit, but still treats all starters equally when in fact that is not close to being accurate.

The third metric looks at starts missed by Pro Bowl performers, that is, players who have made a Pro Bowl in the last 2 years playing for their current team.  The idea here is to look at players who are high-impact starters expected to be the best players on the field.  The flaws are that the Pro Bowl voting system is far from perfect, and again, there is still a difference in value between a star receiver like Brandon Marshall  and a nice cornerback like Tim Jennings, both of whom qualified as Pro Bowl players here.

Finally, I looked at money lost due to injuries, assuming each players gets 1/16^th of his cap for the season per game.  So if a player has a cap hit of $16 million for the year and missed one game due to injury, the team just “lost” $1 million.  The general idea is that teams pay their better players more money, but there will always be guys who are overpaid or underpaid, sometimes dramatically.  Players who particularly get overlooked here are young players playing well on relatively small rookie contracts.

So again, let me emphasize that no one approach is perfect here. Different teams will appear to have larger injury issues than they actually did (or vice-versa) if you look only at one of the four metrics, but looking at all four should generally give us a solid idea of how the Bears fared overall.  I should also mention that all salary cap numbers come from Spotrac and all injury information is from Pro Football Reference.

Results

Here are the totals for all four categories for the Bears.  I did this same study in 2013 with all 4 NFC North teams, which can be seen here.  For comparisons’ sake, I put up the NFC North average from 2013, the NFC North high from 2013, and Chicago’s totals from 2013.

Conclusion

All of the categories except Pro Bowl starts show the Bears being significantly impacted by injuries in 2014.  And none of these totals include the high amount of players who played through injuries that clearly hampered them, including Chris Conte, Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffery, Kyle Fuller, Jared Allen, Jordan Mills, and Jermon Bushrod.

The offensive line was particularly decimated, totaling 45 games and 30 starts lost.  This might help explain some of the offense’s struggles in 2014; it all starts up front.

I find the low number of Pro Bowl starts lost interesting.  It seems like the Bears lost a lot of high-impact (or at least highly paid) players, but it’s telling that few of them were Pro Bowlers recently.  The only players they have who made the Pro Bowl for the Bears in the last two years are Alshon Jeffery, Brandon Marshall, Kyle Long, Matt Forte, Martellus Bennett, and Tim Jennings, and those players stayed fairly healthy (or at least didn’t miss many games) in 2014.

I wish I had numbers from more teams to compare these to, but I simply don’t have the time to compile them for other teams.  Looking at them compared to the NFC North teams in 2013 suggests to me that the Bears were impacted by injuries more than average in 2014, but I don’t have a large enough data set to state that conclusively.

Don’t take this as an argument that the Bears would have been a great, or even good, team in 2014 if they had stayed healthy.  They had a number of problems, including too many overpaid players, excessively poor coaching, too many injuries, and not enough depth to compensate for those injuries.  Injuries certainly played a role in their struggles, but ultimately injuries are a part of football, and good teams need to find a way to overcome them.

Another wonderful conversation with my buddy Adam Jahns of the Chicago Sun-Times. (Apologies for the technical feedback. Soundcloud’s problem, not mine.) In the chat we discuss:

• Battling the national “source” guys
• Cutler’s fans inside the locker room
• How the Trestman era will be remembered
• Jay Glazer’s golf foursomes
• Possible surprises this coming off-season
• Much, much more!

One of the interesting decisions new general manager Ryan Pace will face this offseason is what to do with Alshon Jeffery.  Jeffery has one year remaining on his rookie deal, a time when many players sign their first big extension if they have already proven to be quality performers that the team wants to lock up for their prime.

Jeffery certainly qualifies after combining for 174 catches, 2,534 yards, and 17 touchdowns the last few seasons.  So at first glance, locking up Jeffery to a long-term extension makes absolute sense, and I’m sure Pace will have discussions with Jeffery’s agent about an extension this offseason.

Financial details

What will be important in those discussions is how much money Jeffery’s side asks for. He could look at Brandon Marshall’s deal from last year, which averages $10 million a year and guaranteed $22.3 million, as a baseline.  The Bears could point out that Marshall was a more proven receiver than Jeffery at the time of extension, but Jeffery can counter by pointing to the fact that he is much younger, meaning the team would be paying for his prime instead of later years.

The ideal contracts Jeffery’s side will likely try to compare to are those of Mike Wallace, Percy Harvin, and Dwayne Bowe.  These were all signed by players around Jeffery’s age by players less accomplished than Jeffery, and all have an average salary of $10.7 million or greater with a large amount of guaranteed money.

Of course, two of those three contracts were given in free agency rather than re-signing with your own team, and deals tend to work higher in free agency. Bowe, the only player who re-signed with his current team, was an impending free agent, so he had more leverage than Jeffery, who has one year left on his contract.

Closest Comparisons

The closest comparisons to Jeffery’s situation in the NFL recently have been Victor Cruz and Antonio Brown.  Both signed extensions with their current clubs with one year left on their rookie deals.  Brown signed a 5 year, $42 million deal with $8.5 million guaranteed before the 2012 season, while Cruz signed a 5 year, $43 million deal with $15.6 million guaranteed prior to 2013.

Jeffery is more proven than Brown was at the time of his signing, and that deal was 3 years ago.  Cruz is a closer comparison, as both players had similar numbers prior to their extensions, so we’ll use that deal as a baseline.  The 2013 NFL salary cap was $123 million, while 2015 is expected to be $140 million.  Adjusting for inflation, we’ll approximate a Jeffery extension to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 years, $49 million, with $18 million guaranteed, though it could end up higher than that.

Fundamental flaw

Add in the remaining 1 year and $1.5 million remaining on Jeffery’s rookie deal, and that means his total contract for the Bears would be roughly 6 years and $50 million.  This is a fairly conservative scenario, as I would not be surprised to see that sneak closer to $10 million a year than the $8.3 million per year that estimate provides.

There are a number of ways you can structure a deal, which could be back-loaded to keep early cap numbers low, but let’s assume Jeffery’s contract has roughly an $8 million cap hit in both 2015 and 2016.  Now let’s factor in the cap hits of Jay Cutler, Brandon Marshall, and Martellus Bennett to see how much money Chicago would have invested in their primary passing game components for the next 2 years (using estimated cap figures of $140 million for 2015 and $150 million for 2016).

That’s an awful lot of money when you consider that the best Chicago’s passing offense can reasonably be expected to be at that point is a lower-level top 10 passing attack.  No matter how high or low your opinion of Jay Cutler, he is never going to perform at a top 5 level in the NFL, so you’re paying huge money to have good but not great production.

Options abound

Is that a reasonable path to team success?  That is what Pace must balance when considering what to do with Cutler and Marshall and their contracts and how to handle Alshon Jeffery.  There are massive needs on this roster that need to be addressed, and spending so much money on the passing attack may leave them underfunded.

So what should Pace do?  I see a number of options that will get some sort of value from Jeffery, each of which have their pros and cons.

1. Trade Jeffery for multiple picks, spend that money elsewhere, and hope you can build a good team sooner rather than later.
2. Let Jeffery play out his rookie deal, spend that money elsewhere this year, and face the likelihood of having to pay Jeffery more after 2015 (especially after receivers like Dez Bryant and Randall Cobb get new contracts this offseason).
3. Give Jeffery an extension now, but backload it so the cap hits remain low until after some of those other deals are off the books and then balloon up to high levels.
4. Give Jeffery a balanced extension now and focus on rebuilding elsewhere through the draft.  Use the money freed up when those other deals come off the books to pay guys you draft now when it’s time to pay them in a few years.
5. Cut Brandon Marshall and use that money to sign Alshon to an extension.  Save the rest of your money for fixing the defense.

Personally, I like option 4 the best, but that has some negative short-term ramifications that could make it unattractive to a new general manager trying to establish some job security.  The only way the Bears would be likely to field a playoff team in the next 2 years under that method is if the general manager has some excellent defensive drafts to rebuild a unit that has been among the worst in the NFL the last two years.