I recently talked about just how quickly the salaries of established quarterbacks are increasing relative to the salary cap.  In it, I found the top 15 or so quarterbacks have salaries that are increasing at a rate disproportionate to the salary cap.

Today, I want to look at the amount of money Super Bowl teams spend on their quarterbacks.  So I looked at the cap hit (as a percentage of the total cap) of the highest paid quarterback on the roster for every Super Bowl participant since 2000, as well as where that ranked among NFL quarterbacks.

A few quick notes:

• Since there have been a few instances of teams having a guy who was not their highest paid quarterback start for them in the Super Bowl, I decided to go with the highest cap hit for a quarterback on the roster instead.
• 2010 is not included because it was an uncapped year.
• All salary cap data from 2000-2009 comes from the USA Today database.  All data since 2011 comes from Spotrac.

The data

There are several interesting tidbits I’d like to point out here.

It is possible for teams to spend a premium on a quarterback and still compete for the Super Bowl.  7 of the 28 teams in the list (25%) had a quarterback who had one of the top 5 quarterback cap hits in the NFL that year and made the Super Bowl, and 4 of those 7 teams won.

This might illustrate Peyton Manning’s career pretty well: he’s the only quarterback taking up more than 12% of his team’s cap to go to the Super Bowl, and he did it twice: once at 14.2% and once at 17.8%.  Both of them dwarfed the 11.8% any other quarterback has accounted for while making the Super Bowl.  Of course, he lost both times, which might reflect that he was taking up too much money, leaving his team weak in other areas.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Seahawks made the Super Bowl in back to back years without a quarterback accounting for even 1% of the cap.  And in both instances their highest paid quarterback was Tavaris Jackson, not Russell Wilson.  That helps explain why they were able to afford so many high quality players at other positions.  Overall, this isn’t really a repeatable pattern, as it’s extremely rare to land a quarterback outside of the first round of the draft who plays at such a high level so quickly.  When that happens, your team basically gets an extra 10% of the cap to work with over everybody else.

How much is too much?

So how much is too much to pay a quarterback?  That’s the question teams are going to have to answer in the coming years as quarterback contracts continue to climb.

The answer obviously varies depending on the caliber of quarterback.  Somebody like Peyton Manning deserves to be paid more than Matthew Stafford.  But no quarterback in the NFL, no matter how good, has won a Super Bowl in the last 15 years while using up more than 12% of his teams’ salary cap.  Of course, with quarterback contract inflation, that may not hold, as nine quarterbacks are currently slated to have a cap hit of at least 12% of their teams’ total cap ($17.2M) in 2015, including presumed Super Bowl contenders like Green Bay and Denver.

I am skeptical that a middle of the road quarterback like Stafford (or Alex Smith, Jay Cutler, Andy Dalton, Colin Kaepernick, etc.) can win a Super Bowl while on a contract paying him more than 10% of his teams’ salary cap.  I am also skeptical that anybody can win a Super Bowl when their quarterback’s cap hit is astronomical, such as we see in 2015 with Drew Brees (18.5%, $26.4M) or Tony Romo (19.4%, $27.8M).

In my opinion, it’s not a coincidence that we are seeing players like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning take contracts, pay cuts, or restructures that keep their cap hits a little lower.  Brady won his 4th Super Bowl in 2014 with a deal that guarantees him almost all his money but never puts his cap hit above $16 million.  Manning just agreed to come back to Denver on a reduced contract that dropped his cap hit to $17.5 million.

Tipping point reached?

Between those moves, the financial disarray teams like Dallas and New Orleans are in due to absurd quarterback contracts and restructures, and the pay-as-you-go deals signed by Colin Kaepernick and Andy Dalton last offseason, I can’t help but wonder if we have reached a tipping point with quarterback contracts.  They have absolutely exploded in the last 3-4 years, and teams might be starting to realize they overpaid.

I wouldn’t be surprised if teams make more of a concerted effort towards more reasonable quarterback contracts going forward, but that is going to be difficult to do, as players typically like to be paid more than the guy before them was (as we just saw with Ben Roethlisberger’s new deal, which set several records).  With Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, Cam Newton, Russell Wilson, and Andrew Luck all coming up on new deals in the next 12 months, it will be fascinating to see if the quarterback market continues its (possibly counterproductive) upward trajectory, flattens out, or begins to decrease.

As I recently discussed when talking about Jay Cutler’s contract, quarterbacks are becoming very expensive in the NFL.  There are 17 quarterbacks with a cap hit of $14 million or more in 2015, a number that might increase as players like Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson look for extensions this offseason.  With a salary cap of $143 million, that means more than half the teams in the NFL have at least 10% of their salary cap devoted to their starting quarterback.

That seems like an awfully high number to me, so I want to look back and see how that has changed through the years.  The NFL salary cap started in 1994, but I was only able to find salary cap data back to 2000 online, so that’s how far this study goes.

The logistics

Since the NFL salary cap has risen from $62.2 million in 2000 to $143.3 million in 2015, using raw cap numbers obviously isn’t going to be feasible.  In order to adjust for salary cap inflation, I will be looking at the percent of the total cap quarterback cap hits use.

All salary cap data from 2000-2009 comes from the USA Today database.  All data since 2011 comes from Spotrac.  2010 was not included in the study for two reasons: that was an uncapped year, and I couldn’t find the necessary data.

I looked at the top 32 cap quarterback cap hits for each year from 2000 to 2015 (excluding 2010).  The 2015 data is included so as to show how the trends are continuing, but it should be noted that not all of the top 32 quarterback contracts have currently been signed.  That data set does not include any free agent contracts from 2015, and two rookie quarterbacks are likely to add to the mix as well.  This won’t impact the top 20 or 25 quarterback cap hits, but it might factor into the bottom part of the top 32.  Note the data was also compiled before Ben Roethlisberger’s recent contract extension, and does not include that.

The data

Overall, the average cap hit of the top 32 quarterbacks has increased from 5.6% in 2000 to 8.4% in 2015.  This number actually stayed fairly constant from 2000-2008, then it took a big jump in 2009, backed down slightly, and has been steadily rising since 2012.

The jump in 2009 was due to a combination of ridiculous rookie deals (Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning, JaMarcus Russell, Carson Palmer, and Philip Rivers were all among the top 10 quarterback cap hits on their rookie deals) and big contracts for star veterans like Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Brett Favre, and Tom Brady.  The other player among top 10 cap hits was Matt Cassel, who received a laughably large contract from Kansas City after they acquired him via trade.

As the rookie contracts expired and were replaced by rookie on reasonable deals, the average quarterback cap hits took a slight dip (though still higher than 2000-2008 levels) in 2010 and 2011.  Over the last 3 years, they have been rising very rapidly, and 2015 (which will end up slightly higher than 8.4% due to the reasons I stated above) makes it look like that trend will continue.

However, this has not been a case of all contracts being inflated evenly, as you can see when you spread out the data.  This is illustrated quite clearly by the graph below, which tracks the cap hits by year for the highest quarterback, 5th highest, 10th highest, and so on every 5.

Here you can see that the growing gap in quarterback cap hits between the 15th and 20th highest paid quarterbacks.  The top 15 or so quarterbacks are all seeing their salaries skyrocket, while the rest are staying relatively constant, once you account for inflation.

Clear dropoff

Why the clear distinction?  Well, here is a list of the guys currently on big contracts ($15 million or higher average salary per year): Aaron Rodgers, Matt Ryan, Joe Flacco, Drew Brees, Colin Kaepernick, Jay Cutler, Tony Romo, Matthew Stafford, Alex Smith, Peyton Manning, Carson Palmer, Eli Manning, Andy Dalton, Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, and Tom Brady.

The other 16 teams in the league either have quarterbacks on rookie deals or are looking at starting players like Chad Henne, Brian Hoyer, Josh McCown, Ryan Mallett, Ryan Fitzpatrick, or similar guys.  You get the idea.

This is why there’s a gap in average contract value (excluding rookie deals) from about $15 million a year to roughly $5 million a year (Josh McCown, Matt Cassel), with only Matt Schaub’s soon to be expired $7 million a year contract in the middle.

If you have one of the guys in the first group, you are ok at quarterback.  Sure, you could do better than many of them, but you could do a whole lot worse, and teams are putting a premium price on that reliable production, even if it is only reliably average.

Is it worth it?

Now we are presented with the (multi) million dollar question: is it worth paying the lowest guys in that solid group such significant money to be average?  Are players like Jay Cutler, Colin Kaepernick, Alex Smith, Carson Palmer, Andy Dalton, Eli Manning, Joe Flacco, and Matthew Stafford really worth committing more than 10% of your salary cap to?

Stay tuned for my next article in this series, when I will look at some recent trends around the NFL to see what the early results might suggest.

Jay Cutler is overpaid and underproducing.

That’s one of the main arguments against Cutler: he was the highest paid player in the NFL last year (even though his cap hit was 3rd highest among quarterbacks), and he stinks.  It’s the reason the Bears need to get rid of Cutler, and the reason nobody will trade for him.

Remember talk of the Bears having to give away a high draft pick to get somebody to take on Cutler’s contract back in December?  That was laughable, and here’s why: the truth of the matter is that Jay Cutler’s contract is right in line for who he is as an NFL quarterback, especially now that 2014 is out of the way on his front-loaded deal.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s take a closer look at how Cutler’s deal compares to the rest of the league’s quarterbacks over the next two years.

2015

Jay Cutler’s 2015 cap hit is $16.5 million, which is 11th in the NFL among quarterbacks.  This is definitely high, but consider that quarterbacks like Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, Cam Newton, and Ryan Tannehill are still operating on rookie deals that prevent them from being paid big money.

Even with that, there are 17 quarterbacks in the NFL with a cap hit of $14 million or more in 2015, and 3 with a cap hit greater than $20 million. Eli Manning ($19.8M), Matthew Stafford ($17.7M), and Sam Bradford ($16.6M) all have higher cap hits than Cutler despite being very similar to him statistically (or worse, in Bradford’s case).  The next two quarterbacks after him are Alex Smith ($15.6M) and Colin Kaepernick ($15.3M). Carson Palmer ($14.5M) also checks in within $2 million of Cutler, as does Joe Flacco ($14.6M), who has a low cap hit that will come back to bite Baltimore in the future, as we’ll see in a minute.

2016

Cutler is currently slated to be 9th among quarterbacks with a $17 million cap hit.  But that does not include Ben Roethlisberger, Cam Newton, Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, or Ryan Tannehill, who all have contracts that expire following the 2015 season.  Several of those players will end up leapfrogging Cutler, which should end up putting him in the 12-15 range.

If you assume all seven of the players I listed will have cap hits of $15 million or greater in 2016 (a reasonable assumption, though it’s possible a few may have backloaded deals that don’t have the cap hit that high in 2016), that makes 18 quarterbacks with cap hits of $15 million or more (5 above $20 million), with 2 more coming in at more than $13 million.  Cutler’s cap hit of $17 million will be behind Joe Flacco ($28.5M-have fun with that!), Matthew Stafford ($22.5M), and Alex Smith ($17.8M), and right ahead of Colin Kaepernick ($16.8M).

Cost of doing business

In other words, Cutler is getting paid right about what he should be based on the quarterback contract landscape around the NFL.  Quarterbacks are ridiculously important, and are therefore ridiculously expensive.  If you have a Jay Cutler (or Andy Dalton, Colin Kaepernick, Matthew Stafford, Alex Smith, Carson Palmer…), you’re paying him a bare minimum of $15 million a year to stick around.  Otherwise you get to try your luck with the Josh McCowns and Brian Hoyers of the world or try and strike lightning in the draft.  Welcome to the modern NFL.

An added bonus of Cutler’s contract is that it never has a balloon year that destroys the cap like Tony Romo ($27.8M in 2015), Drew Brees (average of $26.9M next 2 years), or Joe Flacco ($28.6M in 2016).  Those types of years give the player all the leverage for a favorable re-working of the deal that guarantees more money and moves it to the future, making it extremely cost prohibitive to move on from the player if their play declines (or forces you to swallow a lot of dead money after they retire).

The Bears (or any team they trade Cutler to) can decide to move on with only $2 million in dead money after 2016, which follows two years of very reasonable cap hits (as I have outlined above).  And his cap hits don’t balloon much after that either, as it doesn’t go above $17 million until 2019, at which point Cutler will be 36 and all the dead money in his deal will be gone.  It’s impossible to predict for sure right now with so many new deals to be signed, but it seems highly likely Cutler’s cap hit will not be in the top 10 among quarterbacks in any of the next 4 seasons.

Suffice it to say that Cutler’s contract is certainly not going to have much negative impact on his trade value, should the Bears decide to trade him.  Anybody looking to get an established quarterback like Cutler is going to pay him very close to that amount anyway.

Not great value

Please don’t take this to mean that I think the Bears must stick with Jay Cutler, or that he provides great value, or that he is a great quarterback.  I think Cutler is an average starting quarterback, but the important point is that he is paid like an average starting quarterback.  Whether or not giving an average quarterback that kind of money is a good idea remains to be seen (I have my doubts), but there is really no denying that his contract is pretty much in line with the current quarterback market.

This is not to say that Cutler’s contract is a bargain.  You can certainly make a statistic argument that Cutler has not produced even to the level of the 15th best quarterback in the NFL, which is roughly what I argue he will be paid like over the next few years.  I personally tend to think Cutler is in a group of quarterbacks who fall roughly in the 14-20 range, which makes his contract about right, but you could argue he’s still a little overpaid. Even if you believe that, understand he’s still not absurdly overpaid, and that there are similar quarterbacks to Cutler with similar contracts.

Of the current quarterbacks signed past their rookie deal, the only two I would classify as bargains are Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers.  Brady’s cap hit averages only $15 million a year for the next three years, a bargain for one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. Rodgers comes in at around $19 million a season for the next 3 years, but his consistently high level of play makes him well worth that.

Brady and Rodgers, however, are the exception, not the rule.  It’s not fair to compare Cutler’s contract to theirs while ignoring the majority of deals that set the quarterback market and show quite clearly that Cutler’s contract is not unreasonable.

What should Bears do?

Now that we have that cleared up, it is a fair question to ask if Chicago would be better off trading Cutler and trying to start over with a new quarterback in the draft.  That is an interesting debate with valid arguments to be made on both sides, but it is outside the scope of this article.

All I ask is that you please stop listening to the lazy media narrative, examine the facts, and stop incorrectly calling Jay Cutler the most overpaid player in the league.  He was overpaid in 2014, but the rest of his contract now looks surprisingly reasonable.

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.

“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.

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.

Jay Cutler threw 18 interceptions in only 15 games in 2014, the 2nd most he’s thrown in his 6 year Bears career.  Of course, due to his high number of pass attempts (561, most in his Chicago career), Cutler’s interception rate of 3.2% was actually the 2nd lowest he’s had in Chicago, but he still turned it over too much, especially when you factor in his 9 fumbles.

Like I did for the first half of the season, I’m going to go through all 10 of Cutler’s interceptions after the bye and see what went wrong. Last time, I had three categories for the interceptions, and I will be re-using those three while also adding a fourth:

1. Poor decision. This is when Cutler makes a poor decision to force a ball into traffic.
2. Poor throw. This is when the decision to throw is not necessarily a bad one, but the throw is inaccurate.
3. Miscommunication. This is when Cutler and the intended target are not on the same page, leading to a ball going to nowhere and a turnover.
4. Receiver error: This is when Cutler makes the right read and delivers a good throw, but it bounces off the receiver’s hands and is intercepted.

Let’s get right down to it.

Interception 1

Cutler’s 1st interception of the season’s 2nd half came early in the blowout loss to Green Bay.  The Bears were already trailing 7-0 when he tried to get a pass to Martellus Bennett on 2nd and 10.  Bennett was open, but Cutler failed to lead him enough, allowing safety Micah Hyde to jump in front of the ball and grab the interception.

Note: At one point, all of these gifs worked. But alas, they are now just pictures of the first frame of the gif. Sorry. 

Verdict: poor throw

Interception 2

Cutler’s next interception came later in the same game against Green Bay.  Down 48-7 in the fourth quarter, Cutler stepped up under pressure and tried to force a ball in to Matt Forte.  A Green Bay linebacker tipped it, and cornerback Casey Hayward grabbed the ball for an easy touchdown.  This was 3rd down, but the Bears were in field goal range, so Cutler should have just taken the sack and let Robbie Gould kick.

Verdict: poor decision

Interception 3

Cutler’s next interception came against Minnesota the following week.  The Bears had the ball near midfield with 15 seconds left in the 1st half.  Trying to make something happen, Cutler forced a pass deep to Alshon Jeffery that fell well short and was intercepted by cornerback Xavier Rhodes.  I’m almost tempted to call this a Hail Mary of sorts, due to the game situation, but it was still an awful throw by Cutler.

Verdict: poor throw

Interception 4

With the Bears up 14-10 and on the edge of field goal range midway through the 3rd quarter, Minnesota brought a blitz on 3rd and 9.  Cutler tried to make a play by getting the ball to Brandon Marshall, but safety Harrison Smith was there for the easy interception.  This was just a whole bunch of wrong.  Cutler lofted the ball into traffic off his back foot, which is both a poor throw and a poor decision, while Marshall failed to make the correct blitz read and adjust his route accordingly.

Verdict: 0.5 poor decision, 0.5 miscommunication

Interception 5

After avoiding any interceptions in a win against Tampa Bay, Cutler got back in the act against Detroit on Thanksgiving.  He was able to avoid turnovers until the Bears were down big in the 4th quarter, when he threw two.  The first came on 2nd and 3 with almost 10 minutes left, when a scoring drive would have gotten the Bears back in it.  Cutler tried to force a pass deep to Brandon Marshall, but underthrew him a bit.  The Detroit cornerback was able to tip it, and safety Glover Quin came diving in to grab the interception.  Cutler probably shouldn’t have throw that ball, as Marshall was well covered, but a better delivery might have resulted in a big play.

Verdict: 0.5 poor throw, 0.5 poor decision

Interception 6

Cutler’s 2nd interception against Detroit came on the final play of the game, when the outcome had already been decided.  He tried to get a pass in to Marquess Wilson in the end zone, but it went straight to Detroit safety James Ihedigbo.  It’s hard to fault Cutler too much for this one, given the game situation, but it was a poor decision to force a ball to a covered man (though it’s possible nobody was open).

Verdict: poor decision

Interception 7

Cutler’s lone interception against Dallas came late in the 4th quarter with the Bears down 2 scores.  With 1st and goal at the 10 yard line, Cutler tried to loft a pass in to Josh Morgan in the back of the end zone.  Unfortunately, Cutler left it well short, and cornerback Orlando Scandrick was able to snag the ball out of the air and seal the victory for the Cowboys.

Verdict: poor throw

Interception 8

Cutler’s worst game of the year came against New Orleans, when he threw three interceptions, starting on the first drive of the game.  On 3rd and 8, Cutler found an open Martellus Bennett sitting in a hole in the New Orleans zone, but the pass bounced off Bennett’s hands and was caught by Patrick Robinson.  Cutler did absolutely nothing wrong on this play, though I guess you could argue that his throw could have been a smidge better.

Verdict: receiver error

Interception 9

Cutler’s next interception came at the end of the first half.  The ball was snapped near midfield with 12 seconds left, and he tried to force a deep pass to Marquess Wilson.  Wilson made his break and ran upfield, while Cutler expected him to cut towards the sidelines, but either way this was probably getting intercepted, or at least falling incomplete, as Wilson was double covered.  I’m tempted to call this a Hail Mary, but the Bears did have a chance to make something happen shorter and kick a field goal here.

Verdict: 0.5 miscommunication, 0.5 poor decision

Interception 10

Cutler’s final interception of the season came late in the 3rd quarter against the Saints.  With the Bears trailing by 21, Cutler decided to go deep to Alshon Jeffery on 3rd and 3.  He had Jeffery kind of open, but the safety got there before the ball and grabbed an easy interception after Cutler overthrew his intended target.

Verdict: 0.5 poor decision, 0.5 poor throw

Final tally

Over the 2nd half of the season, here’s how I have the tally for Cutler’s 10 interceptions:

• Poor decision: 4
• Poor throw: 4
• Miscommunication: 1
• Receiver error: 1

You’ll note that 3 of those 10 interceptions (numbers 3, 6, and 9) came in situations where Cutler was forced to try and make a play due to severe time limitations.  If you remove those, the numbers change to 2.5 poor decision, 3 poor throw, 0.5 miscommunication, and 1 receiver error.

Combining these totals with the first half of the season (when he had 7 non-Hail Mary interceptions) gives the following final count:

• Poor decision: 7.5
• Poor throw: 4.5
• Miscommunication: 4
• Receiver error: 1

I find it interesting that interceptions in the first half of the season were mostly due to poor decisions and miscommunications, while the 2nd half of the year saw poor throws and poor decisions as the main culprits.  This suggests that the Bears’ offense at least got on the same page a bit more as the season progressed, which is encouraging, but Cutler’s deep accuracy problems did not go away, nor did his tendency to force balls into traffic.

I don’t think Cutler’s ever going to stop making poor decisions that lead to risky throws and some interceptions, but having one of those every two games or so is not the end of the world.  What new coaches Adam Gase and Dowell Logains need to focus on will be improving Cutler’s mechanics and miscommunications among the offense.  Nearly half of Cutler’s interceptions in 2014 came from those areas, and reducing them would go a long way towards improving the offense.

On the surface, Jay Cutler appeared to have one of the better years of his career in 2014.  He set career highs in completion percentage and touchdowns and had the 2nd highest totals of his career in yards and passer rating.

Yet many people have argued that Cutler was actually not good in 2014, for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, he threw 18 interceptions, the 2nd most in his career.  He also had the 2nd lowest yards per attempt average of his career.

But the main knock against Cutler is that he accumulated too many of his stats in garbage time, when the game was already over and teams went into a prevent defense that allowed him easy access to meaningless completions, yards, and touchdowns.  I want to dig into the numbers today to see if this argument holds up.

2014

Using the database at Pro Football Reference, which lets you sort by game situation, I broke up Cutler’s statistics in 2014 into six categories: up two scores (9-16 points), up one score (1-8 points), tied, down one score, down two scores, and down three or more scores (17+ points).  I would have included up three or more scores as a 7th category, but Cutler never attempted a pass while the Bears held a 17 point lead (or greater) at any point in the season.

A first glance does seem to indicate that Cutler did indeed rely on some garbage time statistics to buoy his overall numbers.  He was at his best when the Bears were down by 3 or more scores, which can typically be described as garbage time, as the game is usually out of reach at this point.  Cutler’s completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdown percentage, and touchdown/interception ratio were all significantly higher than his season averages in these instances.  Removing this data from his numbers drops his season stat line from 66.0% completion, 6.8 yards per attempt, 28 touchdowns, 18 interceptions, and an 88.6 passer rating to 65.4% completion, 6.4 yards per attempt, 20 touchdowns, 14 interceptions, and an 85.3 passer rating.

In an attempt to visualize how this looks a little better, I’ve set up the following graph, which showcases Cutler’s passer rating, yards per attempt, interception percentage, and touchdown/interception ratio in all the various game situations.  In order to make the scales all the same, I compared their percent difference from the season average.  So a passer rating of 102.7 while down by 3 or more scores was 15.9% better than his season average of 88.6, and so on. Note that I set it up so that a lower interception percentage reads as a positive number, because this is the desirable outcome.

Here you can visually see that Cutler was at his best when the team was getting blown out, followed by when they were tied or slightly ahead.  When the Bears fell behind, his interceptions increased and touchdowns decreased, leading to a plummeting touchdown/interception ratio and lower passer rating.

All Chicago years

In order to get a better feel for what this type of data normally looks like, I compiled Cutler’s stats for all six of his seasons in Chicago in the same categories.  This has an added advantage of greatly increasing the sample size, which decreases the variation from one touchdown or interception in a smaller data set.

Here we see a similar trend, but with one important difference: Cutler’s stats when the Bears are getting blown out do not skyrocket like they did in 2014.  There seems to be a negative correlation between the team’s situation and Cutler’s performance, which can be visually seen in the graph below.

This negative trend is largely driven by interception percentage, which is at it’s three worst levels in the three categories where the Bears are losing.  This suggests that Cutler has a tendency to force passes when things aren’t going well, which compounds the problem and leads to further struggles.  Conversely, when the Bears have the lead, Cutler can play safer football, and his interception rates tend to be lower.

The numbers back up the assertion that Cutler’s performance variation is largely interception based. A regression of interception percentage against drive differential (+1 for up by 1 score, -1 for down 1 score, etc.) gives a correlation of 0.4, while the correlation for completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdown percentage (the other three stats that go into passer rating) are all 0.1 or lower.

Within season

Of course, one other factor to consider is that Cutler’s statistics have fluctuated from season to season, and ignoring that can lead to a data bias.  For instance, Cutler’s worst season in Chicago was in 2009, when the Bears played from behind more than in some of his better seasons.  Looking at Cutler’s statistics in each situation compared to the other situations in the same year, therefore, is an important control.

The  chart below shows that data, looking at how Cutler’s stats in each game situation compare, on average, to his total production from that same season.  So across his six years in Chicago, Cutler has had a completion percentage 6.3% higher than his total completion percentage that season when his team is up by 17 or more points.

Now we can see a clearer relationship between the game situation and Cutler’s performance, as completion percentage (0.36), interception percentage (0.33), and passer rating (0.45) all have meaningful positive correlations (while yards per attempt and touchdown percentage do not seem to have any discernible pattern). This is nothing shocking; as the team struggles and falls behind, Cutler is forced to throw more, his completion percentage drops, and his turnovers increase, which lowers his passer rating.

Conclusions

The numbers back up the notion that Cutler’s statistics were inflated by garbage time production in 2014.  19% of Cutler’s passing attempts came with the Bears down by 3 or more scores, but those passes accounted for 23% of his yards and 29% of his touchdowns (and 22% of his interceptions).  History suggests that is not a typical pattern for Cutler, so 2014 will likely prove to be an aberration.

The fact that Cutler’s performance gets worse as the team struggles points to how important it is for the Bears to start well with him under center.  When the team plays with a lead, Cutler seems to relax and avoid turning the ball over as much, while he starts pressing and turns the ball over more when they fall behind.  So if Cutler is going to continue to be Chicago’s starting quarterback for the next couple years, building early leads (or at least avoiding early deficits) should be a clear goal for the Bears, as Cutler’s turnover tendencies are likely to do nothing but dig a deeper hole once the Bears fall behind.

When John Fox and the Denver Broncos decided to part ways on Monday, speculation immediately connected him to Chicago.  He’s been the presumed frontrunner for the job ever since, and the Bears made his hiring official today.

This is not the direction I would have gone if I were running the Bears this offseason, but I’m not, and that’s a good thing.  It’s a safe move intended to restore the Bears to respectability both on and off the field, but I don’t think it is one made with a serious goal of winning championships in the next few years (though you could argue that’s a good thing given where the franchise is at right now).

A familiar path

To me, Fox is Lovie Smith, which-as Bears fans should know-comes with both positives and negatives.  They’re both around .500 coaches* who will have the team be disciplined and competitive. They both have issues with in-game management, struggle with using the clock and time outs correctly, and make overly conservative decisions.  They both establish solid defenses and like to run the ball on offense.

(*They’re both around .500 coaches when they aren’t given an all-time great quarterback as a finished product to pad their record with.  In his 10 years before Peyton, Fox averaged 8.1 wins and 0.6 playoff wins per season.  In the 8 years of his prime before Fox, Peyton averaged 12.4 wins and 1.1 playoff wins per season.  In their 3 years together, they averaged 12.7 wins and 0.7 playoff wins per season.  Since Fox’s presence didn’t change Peyton’s outcomes at all from what he was, you’ll pardon me for not giving Fox credit or blame for those 3 seasons with Peyton).

The Bears made a move to go away from Lovie 2 years ago.  It was a risk, and it backfired spectacularly.  Now they’re going back to a Lovie-esque coach, and you can see the appeal.  Fox should help stabilize the franchise and prevent it from being the laughingstock it was in 2014 (on and off the field).  The Bears currently have a lot of big personalities in the locker room, and you can be sure that Fox will keep them in line much better than Trestman did.

Here’s what the next five years will likely look like for the Bears: they will beat most of the bad teams they face, lose to many of the good ones, and end up somewhere around .500 overall.  They will not win the NFC North unless something happens to Aaron Rodgers, but should get 1-2 wild card berths.  And you know what?  That’s not such a terrible outcome; you can definitely do worse.

Future Concerns

In 4-5 years, Fox will likely be ready to retire.  He is currently 59 (60 in February), and only one current NFL coach is older than 65.  The hope is that the Bears in 2020 will be in a similar place to where they were in 2012, with a good team (albeit hopefully younger than the 2012 version) looking for a great coach to take them over the top.

My fear with this is that Fox will try to pressure the Bears to make win-now decisions, bringing in older free agents that give them a better chance to be good now but hamper their ability to be great in the future by stunting the growth of young players and/or creating future cap problems (like are an annual event in New Orleans, where GM Ryan Pace comes from). Pace must maintain the control of football operations he says he has and avoid making moves that help the team’s present at the expense of the future.

Of course, the win-now approach Fox brings also starts to give us some clues on veterans whose futures in Chicago were thought to be up in the air.  With Fox hired, I think it is very likely that Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall are both in Chicago for the next two years at least.  And that is not a bad thing, I just hope these moves don’t preclude the Bears from planning ahead and looking for their eventual replacements sooner rather than later.

Those veterans sticking around makes sense if Chicago’s plan is to be competitive now while building to be better in the future.  That is exactly what they should be doing, I only hope they don’t tilt that balance too far towards the now at the expense of the future.

Final thoughts

Personally, I wanted to see the Bears take a risk on a younger coach with more upside than Fox, and somebody who would be around longer than 5 years if they pan out, but I can see why Chicago thought otherwise.  In 2012, they were positioned to make a safe hire in Bruce Arians, but went for the home run with Trestman, and ended up striking out.  Now they don’t want to repeat that mistake, so they went with a solid double in John Fox instead of swinging for the fences and risking setting the franchise back even further.

You can do much worse in a head coach than John Fox, as Bears fans should know after watching Marc Trestman slowly destroy the franchise over the past two years.  But I think you can do better than him as well, and I wish the Bears would have made more of an effort to do just that instead of settling for a well known good-but-not-great coach.

The cynic could say they’ve seen this coming since October, maybe even September.  Even the most optimistic Bears supporter has had some inkling of it since the start of December.

But few could have predicted just how bad things would get in Chicago as the season continues to head south. Nobody is in charge inside of Chicago’s locker room, which has resulted in everybody doing whatever they can to save their own skin at the expense of the team.  Let’s recap just how far back the jarring lack of leadership goes.

September 3

Lance Briggs, the play caller and supposed on-field leader of the defense, skipped Chicago’s first practice of the season to go open his restaurant in California.  You’d think a guy coming off a 6 month offseason could have scheduled more intelligently.

Plenty of people-myself included-said this was no big deal.  It was just a walkthrough, and Briggs was a seasoned player who wouldn’t miss anything.  Plenty of people blamed Briggs for selfishly putting his own interests ahead of the team and not acting like a veteran leader.  Plenty of people blamed head coach Marc Trestman for giving Briggs the practice off for “personal reasons” while saying he didn’t bother asking what they were.

Chicago would go on to lose their season opener at home to the heavy underdog Buffalo Bills.  Briggs played a poor game and was directly responsible for some defensive miscommunications that led to big plays for the Bills.  In retrospect, this would not have not been a huge deal if it was an isolated incident, but it showcased the clear lack of leadership in Chicago, from the coaches to the players.

October 19

Following a nice road win at the Atlanta Falcons that was their best game of the season to that point, Chicago came out flat at home and lost 27-14 to Miami to fall to 3-4 with two difficult road games looming.  Particularly troublesome was the first half, when the Bears were held scoreless and only ran the ball twice.

There was a postgame outburst in the locker room from Brandon Marshall, one of the offensive leaders, that reportedly involved a fight with kicker Robbie Gould, the leader of the special teams.  Defensive leader Lance Briggs, meanwhile, walked out of the locker room rather than getting involved and trying to calm the situation down.

In press conferences that week, head coach Marc Trestman insinuated the reason the Bears weren’t running the ball more was because Cutler was checking out of too many runs, then revealed he stripped Cutler of the ability to make such checks in the second half.

Here we have the first instance of somebody under fire deliberately shifting blame to somebody else associated with the team in an effort to save themselves.  Don’t worry, it won’t be the last.

December 1

Following a Thanksgiving loss in which they called only 7 runs against 52 passes, Jay Cutler, Matt Forte, and Aaron Kromer all said the Bears need to run the ball more.  In doing so, they insinuated that the blame lied on Trestman as the playcaller to establish the run and separated themselves from the embattled coach.

Once again, we see fingers being pointed, with players and coaches trying to place the blame on anybody but themselves.

December 9

Following a home loss to the Dallas Cowboys that saw him injure two ribs and go on season-ending injured reserve, Brandon Marshall goes on the radio and admits he understands why people would have buyers’ remorse with Jay Cutler’s contract.  He also thanks those who visited him in the hospital, naming many names but not Cutler, leading to speculation that there is a rift in their previously close relationship.

I personally think this interview was blown out of proportion, but here again you see no clear leadership.  Marshall and Cutler are supposed to be the leaders of the offense, and very possibly the team, yet they are not exactly sticking up for each other publicly or toeing the company line.

December 11

Now we come to the latest, and most egregious, incident.  Aaron Kromer apologized to the offensive players, revealing that he had leaked some negative comments about Cutler to Ian Rapaport a few weeks earlier.  Patrick Mannelly then said on the radio several players had told him the apology felt fake.  Marshall took to Twitter to bash that players had talked to the media about the meeting, which was presumably supposed to remain private.

Yet again we see a free for all situation where every man seems to be in it for himself.  Nobody is keeping any players or coaches in line.  Nobody is stepping up, assuming responsibility, and making all this nonsense stop.

Who is in charge?

This leads to the obvious question: who is in charge of the Chicago Bears?  Normally, you would say the head coach.  So where is Trestman in all this? He has been involved in pointing fingers at others publicly.  He has not done anything that we know of to promote accountability since way back in August, when he suspended Martellus Bennett for a training camp fight.  Otherwise, he keeps going in front of the media and insists that everything is fine while chaos erupts all around him from players and coaches alike.

If the head coach is not the man in charge, then surely there must be some player who holds his peers accountable, right?  Not in this case.  The most logical candidate would be Jay Cutler, but he’s never been that guy.  That guy was Brian Urlacher until he retired following the 2012 season.  None of the logical candidates-Jay Cutler, Brandon Marshall, Matt Forte, and Lance Briggs-have stepped up to do that.

What we’re left with now is a sinking ship with no captain.  In a situation like that, everybody looks out for their own interests above all others, which will never work in a  sport like football, where you have to put the team above yourself.  And that is the greatest indictment of all on this coaching staff, and the biggest reason that they all need to go.