When Jay Cutler was out with an ankle injury earlier this season, Josh McCown stepped in at quarterback and did an excellent job for the Bears.
That to some wondering about both how McCown’s play might impact Cutler’s future in Chicago and what kind of contract McCown might get from the Bears or someone else in the offseason. Before that can happen, though, McCown has to decide he wants to keep playing.
That decision is more involved than you might guess. McCown’s wife and four kids aren’t with him in Chicago and McCown said this week that he isn’t sure if he wants to keep playing if it means continually missing moments in their lives.
“But for me, I know that there is a time coming where it’s going to get harder and harder. I kind of have a thought process in my mind of: I don’t know if I want to do this and let her get out of my house having done this the last four years where we live apart,” McCown said, via the Chicago Sun-Times. “There’s not enough money in the world to justify and make it feel OK to miss those games and stuff like that. It’s a process. It’s things that we think about, quite honestly, moving forward in my career in the direction, ‘Are we going to keep playing?’ All those things, because it’s a real question, because those things are hard.”
McCown is going to have suitors vying for his services this offseason, be it as a potential starter or the kind of reliable backup he has proven to be with the Bears. That will make it hard to walk away from the game, even with reasons for staying home that are as compelling as the ones that McCown has in his life.