Jay Cutler has a complicated legacy with the Chicago Bears. He’d probably be the first to admit that. The guy was hard to like because of a standoffish personality. He had poor body language and a quick trigger release that led to way too many interceptions. At the same time, he broke every notable team passing record and won a lot of football games despite not always getting much of help.
So yeah. It’s not hard to understand why fans are split on him. Many still love him to this day and that fondness has only grown in recent years. Others believe the bad outweighed the good and the Bears stuck with him for way too long. Regardless, nobody can argue the man had his fair share of bright moments in Chicago.
It also turns out he should get a little more respect than he has.
Why? Football Outsiders, one of the best analytics-based websites out there, was compiling research for reviewing the best quarterbacks of the 2010s. They did this through three categories: passing, rushing, and receiving. For this, they used a stat call DYAR or Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement. After crunching the number, Russell Wilson was unsurprisingly the best overall DYAR QB when it came to rushing. What the researches weren’t prepared to see is that when they switched to DVOA or Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, which judged rushing efficiency. Take a guess at who was #1.
“The first thing you must realize is that DYAR and DVOA do not include kneeldowns, and Cutler’s standard rushing stats are turfed because he took a ton of knees — 74 of them for a combined loss of 69 yards, to be specific. All told, 32% of Cutler’s official rush attempts this decade were simple kneels to kill clock. Of the top 20 quarterbacks in rushing DYAR, only Drew Brees (54% — the Saints won a lot more games than Cutler’s Bears or Dolphins) was kneeling down on a higher share of his rushing attempts.
Take away those kneeldowns, and Cutler averaged a Vick-esque 7.3 yards per carry, earning a first down nearly half the time. And Cutler, like Wilson, was often making something out of nothing — only 24% of his rushing first downs came with less than 4 yards to go, and on average he needed 6.9 yards to convert them.”
Jay Cutler never got enough credit for his mobility
Most people always lauded Cutler for his ridiculous arm. It often overshadowed how good of athlete he was. One looks at his season totals and the QB never had more than 233 rushing yards in a season for the Bears. Wilson, by comparison, never had less than 342. Cutler wasn’t viewed as a running QB. Yet so many times when his team needed him to make a play, he’d often do it with his legs.
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Cutler rushed for 89 first downs in 102 games during his time in Chicago. He also scored six touchdowns with his feet. He was definitely a threat. It was just that he preferred to beat teams through the air. Maybe this will serve as a reminder that the guy was pretty good and fans should be a little more appreciative of what he accomplished.
