Bill Polian on the deal <script src="http://player.espn.com/player.js?playerBrandingId=4ef8000cbaf34c1687a7d9a26fe0e89e&adSetCode=91cDU6NuXTGKz3OdjOxFdAgJVtQcKJnI&pcode=1kNG061cgaoolOncv54OAO1ceO-I&width=576&height=324&externalId=espn:10232103&thruParam_espn-ui[autoPlay]=false&thruParam_espn-ui[playRelatedExternally]=true"></script>
among qb's with 250 pass attempts, he was 12th in qb rating last year. over the last 3 years, among qb's with 500 pass attempts, he was 18th in qb rating. i don't pay much attention to the nfl salary cap, but i didn't think i was so out of touch that middle of the road starters who were under .500 and got outplayed by their backup were getting $18M/yr. and i don't know if mccown played terrible defenses, but his stats are so much better than cutler's that it seems hard to believe that explains the whole difference.
Case Keenum outplayed Schaub for a few games too - and then we saw what happens over a longer time frame. McCown is a career backup for a reason. He might have turned a corner and become really good - but again, you're taking a huge risk and potentially spending the next decade cycling through QBs to find a decent one. Chicago has been through that since forever - they finally found one that's good enough to stick with, so it's not surprising they might overpay. Stability has huge amounts of value for the team - that's what they are paying for.
Even McCown knows his place. He's talking about retiring after what was easily the best stretch of his professional career. per Rotoworld
i suppose that was my point. if your starting qb is playing at such a level that his backup can just stroll in and handily outplay him, i don't see the starter as irreplaceable and needing an $18M/yr contract. i definitely wasn't advocating mccown as the long term solution. maybe. but they made a super bowl with rex grossman by being good at other things. does overpaying a mediocre starter get them closer to the super bowl? again, i don't follow nfl cap matters the way i do the nba, but it seems like a somewhat zero sum game with the harder nfl cap. overpaying a mediocre qb has got to show up as a weakness somewhere else i would think. or maybe even without max contracts, the nfl is like the nba where the middle of the road guys get overpaid relative to the truly elite because guys like rogers/brees/manning just aren't going to have contracts that much higher than anyone else. and maybe this is just another case of that.
I agree that paying Cutler makes building the rest of the team harder. But I think Rex Grossman is a great example of the alternative - if you catch lightning in a bottle and he has a great season, it works. But you can't rely on it - you build an entire team and there's a 50/50 chance it will all be meaningless because your QB sucks. And you can't just fix that on the fly, so your season is wasted. Everything the Chicago painstakingly built was wasted all the other years when they had no offense. The benefit to Cutler is that it gives you stability at the the QB position, so it gives you predictability - if you can successfully build other parts, you no longer have to worry about wasting it all due to a lack of QB. Is it as good as having an all-star QB? Absolutely not. But it's much better than going year-to-year hoping that your QB might pan out and have a good season.
