The Bears got back to business on Monday by making a change on their offensive line and updating the status of running back Matt Forte, likely hoping that would get people looking forward to Week Three instead of looking back to the loss to the Packers.
That might take another couple of days because while coach Lovie Smith was doing the housekeeping, cornerback D.J. Moore was talking about Cutler. And his comments didn’t do much to kill the notion that there is the potential for serious problems between the quarterback and his teammates in and out of the locker room. Moore first joked about how much coverage there’s been of Cutler yelling at left tackle J’Marcus Webb last Thursday, but then veered into a criticism of the quarterback’s sideline demeanor.
“I don’t think you can act like that, though. To make it seem like it’s just my fault or what not, I think it’s just wrong, though honestly,” Moore said, via Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times. “I would feel a certain way if he did me like that, to make it seem like, ‘Well, the reason I’m having a bad game is because is what you’re doing and not about me taking accountability for myself because I’m throwing these type of passes and doing these type of reads.’ It’s a tough situation.”
It’s a bit more honesty than we were expecting to see from a current member of the Bears on the Cutler issue as players tend to tread carefully when it comes to slagging teammates publicly. Moore doesn’t speak for everyone in the locker room, but his willingness to say it tells you that there isn’t much uneasiness about speaking one’s mind about the quarterback.
Moore went on to hit on something that gets to the heart of how this will wind up playing out. Moore predicted Cutler would connect on a few passes and people will stop talking about what happened in Green Bay. If Cutler and the Bears win his behavior will get filtered differently, the same way it gets filtered differently for other quarterbacks with a resume that gives them more leeway to point fingers when things go wrong.