Last week, Bears General Manager Phil Emery defended Jay Cutler as a “winning quarterback” during an online Q&A with fans who wanted to know if Emery was having any regrets about signing Cutler to an extension in the offseason.
Cutler and the Bears lost again to the Patriots last Sunday, which means that the winning quarterback is in charge of a 3-5 team halfway through the season. Cutler turned the ball over twice against New England and has turned the ball over multiple times in each of Chicago’s losses this season, which isn’t enough for Emery to back off support for the quarterback but might have been enough for him to tweak his earlier view on Cutler’s status as a winner.
“Obviously, we’re a 3-5 team, and he’s a 3-5 quarterback right now,” Emery said, via ESPN.com. “There’s a lot of things he’s got to get better at. There are a lot of things we’ve got to get better at. In terms of protecting the ball, in the fumbles, he had one against San Francisco [in Week 2], had one this past week and had one the previous week against Miami. Some of them are just situations, a guy coming from the blind side. But obviously, you have to keep the ball up and away. We’ve got to get better at that. Obviously he knows that. He holds himself accountable for it, and he’ll continue to strive to get better in that area.”
Coach Marc Trestman said he thinks Cutler is “handling himself exceptionally well on a play-by-play basis” and that the team needs to do a better job of playing “complementary football” while also allowing that there are some negatives they’d like to see Cutler erase.
It’s more likely that Cutler will remain the same quarterback with the same positives and negatives that he’s displayed this season and throughout his career. That was enough for the Bears to sign him to an extension that ties them to him for the next few seasons, so they’ll have plenty of chances to weigh in on how that decision is working out as long as all three are still in Chicago.