Six years and one week ago, Jay Cutler returned to the starting lineup after missing four games with an ankle injury. With his team in the playoff hunt and half the city calling for Josh McCown to stay the starter, Cutler quarterbacked the Bears to three fourth-quarter scores, a victory against the Browns — and a lucrative contract for himself.
Less than a month later, general manager Phil Emery gushed about Cutler’s 45-yard back-foot touchdown pass to Alshon Jeffery in Cleveland when explaining why he gave the quarterback a seven-year, $126 million deal.
“I think he finally felt the weight off his shoulders ...” Emery said. “He showed everybody that he is ultimately a great competitor.”
Emery didn’t last another year as GM. Coach Marc Trestman was fired alongside him.
The lesson: Be careful how much stock you put in a late-season game — or any one game at all — when evaluating your quarterback’s future.
The current Bears regime would be wise to remember that when squinting to see if their current quarterback, Mitch Trubisky, is making sufficient progress heading into the offseason. In July, general manager Ryan Pace said, setting the bar low, that he wanted to see “steady, incremental improvement” from his quarterback all season long. That holds for the final two games.
Big-picture, the rest of the season means little to the Bears after they were eliminated from playoff contention last week. But it means everything to Trubisky, whose starting job next year — not to mention the team’s long-term plans for him — is at stake.
That has nothing to do with Patrick Mahomes standing on the opposite sideline.
“The biggest thing with me at the quarterback position is real simple — it comes down to decision-making,” coach Matt Nagy said Friday. “A lot of these guys in this league, we all have talent, and a lot of guys have talent. But I think the separator, the one that separates people, is through decision-making.
“So the next couple games, just keeping an eye on how his decision-making continues to grow, puts us in good spots. And then if there’s a play that’s not perfect, how do we keep it from being a bad play?
“He’s been growing with that, and I think that’s the key these next two games.”
His decision-making wasn’t sharp in the first half of the season, though Nagy argued his quarterback wasn’t the only thing wrong with the offense. Trubisky, his coach said, would force a bad throw or kill the wrong play at the line of scrimmage or just attempt to do too much on a play that wasn’t working.
“But he’s been doing a really good job at limiting that,” Nagy said. “It’s hard to be perfect. There’s a lot of decisions, a lot of things that go into playing quarterback. Calling plays, getting in and out of the huddle, seeing what the defense is in and then making all the ...
“The easiest part of playing quarterback is actually making the throw. There’s a lot of stuff that goes before that. So that’s what we’re trying to continue to see him grow in.”
That it’s a topic of conversation 30 regular-season games into the pairing of coach and quarterback is a sad statement. Andy Reid, the Chiefs’ coach and Nagy’s best friend in coaching, defended Trubisky’s messy season this week.
“Every quarterback, every game, every situation is not going to be perfect,” Reid said. “But his resilience there — to keep battling like he did through the year — that’s something special. And how he’s been playing good football.”
Given his relationship with the Bears coach, Reid’s framing of Trubisky’s play could be a preview of how the Bears will spin Trubisky’s performance when the year is over.
But first, he’s got two more games to play.
