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These are excerpts. To read the whole article click the link below.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/05/08/jay-cutler-tv-nfl-quarterbacks-offseason-draft-peter-king
Jay Cutler and the Odd Offseason of QB Movement
With the sullen ex-Bear heading to TV, it’s a good time to reset how nonsensical the situations under center have become. Plus more draft fallout, an NBA GM talks football and the sad state of a ’72 Dolphins star
by Peter King
Friday capped the strangest quarterback off-season I can remember. That’s when Jay Cutler, a C-plus quarterback with four or five years left in him (or so we thought) surprised a quarterback-needy league by jumping to the Fox broadcast booth.
Not only is it downright weird to think of the perennially sour Cutler as some future aw-shucks Collinsworth. It’s weirder to think of the 34-year-old Cutler as not good enough to start anymore in the NFL. And weirder still to think of the employed and unemployed at the most important position in sports.
THEY’RE STARTING
Tom Savage, Houston. Six years ago, he lost the job at Rutgers. After Brock Osweiler flunked out, and after Tony Romo picked TV over football, and after the Texans passed on the acidic Cutler, Savage, with two career starts and zero career touchdown passes, will try to hold off first-round rookie Deshaun Watson through a medium-tough September (Jags, at Bengals, at Patriots).
Tom Savage and Cody Kessler (left) will have starting quarterback jobs in 2017; Jay Cutler and Tony Romo will not
Photo: Getty Images (4)
Cody Kessler, Cleveland. The 2016 third-rounder showed promise last year, if you call not turning the ball over while going 0-8 “promise.” He should hold off rookie DeShone Kizer for a while, but such is life on the Browns quarterback depth chart that Kessler might not even be a Brown nine months from now.
Browns quarterback interlude
Cleveland’s QB depth chart in early May of recent seasons
2017: Cody Kessler, Kevin Hogan, DeShone Kizer, Brock Osweiler.
2016: Robert Griffin III, Josh McCown, Cody Kessler, Austin Davis, Connor Shaw, Pat Devlin.
2015: Josh McCown, Johnny Manziel, Thaddeus Lewis, Connor Shaw.
2014: Brian Hoyer, Johnny Manziel, Tyler Thigpen, Connor Shaw.
2013: Brandon Weeden, Jason Campbell, Thaddeus Lewis.
Five Mays. Fifteen different quarterbacks.
Mike Glennon, Chicago. He last started a game three years ago, and the Bears showed so much faith in him that they used four draft choices to move up to pick the rookie quarterback that GM Ryan Pace thinks will replace him, Mitchell Trubisky.
Brian Hoyer, San Francisco. After looking scared in a four-pick playoff embarrassment for Houston 16 months ago, Hoyer slightly redeemed himself in a five-start, 67-percent relief stint with the Bears last year. Still, he’s a Kyle Shanahan stopgap with the Niners.
Josh McCown, New York Jets. The stats don’t show it, but he’s a good quarterback to have on the roster, a team-first guy who might be best suited getting Bryce Petty or Christian Hackenberg ready to play. Whoever plays, the Jets will be in the quarterback market in 2018. All in, in fact.
THEY’RE NOT STARTING
Tony Romo. He knows he could have quarterbacked Houston if he wanted to. But he got a once-in-a-decade offer—walking off the field into a network’s top analyst job, for CBS—which sped his decision.
Jay Cutler. More below. The man with 134 more career passing yards than Kurt Warner and 14 more career touchdown passes than Ken Stabler drew scant interest from the only team that made sense—Houston. That probably told him everything. Cutler’s legacy will be that he underachieved (11 years, one playoff win) while being the most media-repellant quarterback of his era.
Colin Kaepernick. So Kaepernick has bought a place in downtown Manhattan and lives in the big city fairly anonymously. I spent a long draft weekend with the Niners in California, and there are those in the building who think Kaepernick might actually rather do social justice work full-time than play quarterback. He emerges in New York City occasionally for noble cause work, last week donating 100 men’s suits to a parole office in Queens, so recipients, recently out of prison, would look more presentable when going on job interviews.
I haven’t talked to Kaepernick, so I have no idea what his gut is telling him about what to do with his life. But it’s crazy that a quarterback who four years ago was coming off a Super Bowl appearance and looked to be a long-term answer has no team now and no hot NFL prospects that anyone can see.
If I were a pro scout or a GM with a starting or backup quarterback need, I’d be on a plane to New York to have lunch with Kaepernick to ask him where he sees his life going. And if he sees a football future, and if I had a great quarterback coach (Sean McVay with the Rams, Bruce Arians in Arizona), I’d sign him to an incentive-laden contract. Right now.
Robert Griffin III. He’s been unemployed for two months after the Browns cut him. The career of the 2012 Offensive Rookie of the Year is in more jeopardy than Kaepernick’s. Regardless of what he, his family or Washington owner Daniel Snyder thinks, Griffin’s biggest error was being the anti-Brady.
Instead of simply being willing to be coached hard by proven quarterback developers Mike and Kyle Shanahan (and I understand all the divisive tributaries that go along with that), Griffin and his family thought they knew best. The resulting wedge driven between him and his coaches, on top of the knee injury he suffered in the playoffs in January 2013, have been factors he hasn’t recovered from.
Texans Quarterback Interlude
Romo, Cutler, Kaepernick and Griffin have all played in the playoffs in the past six years. The Texans have engaged none in serious contract discussions this off-season.
Ryan Fitzpatrick. Not so stunning he’s on the street. But like McCown, he’s a smart, low-ego guy who’d be a good fit on a team developing a young quarterback.
Here’s the commonality I see: The five teams with weak or unproven starters (Browns, Jets, Texans, Bears, 49ers) all have coaches who want to do it their way—developing players they want to build around. Hue Jackson’s that way. Kyle Shanahan and Bill O’Brien too. And GMs Mike Maccagnan of the Jets and Ryan Pace of the Bears have made it clear they prefer to develop their quarterback of the future, either through the draft or by signing a young free-agent with a spotless record who is totally devoted to football.
Fair or unfair, Cutler’s got a reputation of being an island. When Hue Jackson coached Oakland, he wanted to draft Kaepernick but was trumped by the Niners; now Jackson has shown zero interest in Kaepernick. Coaches want team guys, and they want football devotees. Not all great quarterbacks have had those traits, but look at teams that were desperate for quarterbacks entering this off-season. Houston and Cleveland chose to draft college players with question marks.
Watson and Kizer, those teams figured, will be devoted to football, clay willing to be molded. We’ll see if those choices work. But if you’d told me three months ago the NFL would open 2017 with Romo, Cutler and Kaepernick in occupations other than football, I’d have been stunned.
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On Jay Cutler Taking the Color Job with FOX
Photo: Elsa/Getty Images
Quite a few thoughts, actually:
• Players who have been crappy with the media have gone to work for TV and been good at it. Sterling Sharpe, for one. You know why Sharpe was better than anyone thought he’d be? Because he didn’t care who he skewered, in part. As a player, Cutler had an acidic personality. He was a Negative Nate. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be bad at TV. It actually means he’s got a real chance to be good, if he works at it and stays true to his real opinions.
• What convinced Fox execs in the Cutler audition that he would be good enough to plug in for John Lynch on its number two NFL team? Sounds like it was two things, from the audition Cutler had in Los Angeles with play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt two weeks ago, when they sat in a quiet room on the Fox lot and voiced-over the Arizona-Seattle game from Christmas Eve. “Just being conversational,” Burkhardt said Friday.
“Knowing when to talk and when to shut up. Some guys talk, talk, talk, talk. Jay said his piece and just stopped.” And being prescient, just watching the game. On one play, near the Arizona goal line, Cutler piped up that the pass play failed because Jermaine Kearse was supposed to “rub,” or legally screen, the defensive back, and he missed the rub, and the ball fell incomplete. “There was another play, Carson Palmer to J.J. Nelson for an 80-yard touchdown, that Jay made a great observation,” Burkhardt said. “As soon as they got to the line, Jay knew it.
He said Palmer used his eyes perfectly to move the safety and keep him away from where he wanted to throw. When we got to the last replay, there was a head-on shot of Palmer’s eyes, and then he looked left right at the snap, and Nelson was to the right, and Palmer held the safety there. Palmer threw the bomb and the safety couldn’t get back in time to make the play. Overall, he had some really cool minutiae. He was so conversational.”
• Could Cutler play again? Who knows. “It seemed to me he’s checked out of football emotionally,” Burkhardt said. It’s odd that he isn’t playing, to be sure, but think of this from Cutler’s perspective. He’s made $73 million in the last five years alone. He doesn’t need a big payday. And for much of his eight seasons in Chicago, he’s been beat up behind a shaky offensive line.
Imagine talking to the Jets, for instance, or even Houston, and playing again behind a porous offensive line. With the Jets, he had to be thinking: Okay, I’ll make good money, and I’ll lose, and I’ll get sacked a lot. (And, though I doubt he was thinking this, add in this P.S.: He’d get the crap ripped out of him on the back pages of the tabloids as long as the Jets lost.)
Why do that? Hard to think that would be a lot of fun, particularly considering you could make decent money sitting up in a booth—and maybe discovering a new vocation you actually might like.
• I didn’t know Cutler well, and hadn’t talked to him much since he was with the Bears. But I always thought he blew some good chances in getting to know some of the former quarterbacks who did his games. Troy Aikman, Dan Fouts, Phil Simms, Steve Beuerlein. Cutler used to view those production meetings as necessary evils instead of using them to draw knowledge out of those guys. Cutler was a little too smart for his own good.
• Thought the best game I ever saw Cutler play was on a Monday night in October 2011, when the mediocre Bears faced the then-unbeaten Lions in Detroit and Cutler, in a loss, played as valiantly as a quarterback could play. The Detroit front seven (Ndamukong Suh, Nick Fairley, Kyle Vanden Bosch, Cliff Avril, Lawrence Jackson, etc.) must have hit him 20 times that night.
He had not a moment’s peace. But he completed 28 of 38 passes, threw no picks, and hung in against the most brutal of rushes. Chicago lost, but I thought that was the game of games in a career that had more disappointment than success.
• Eleven seasons, one playoff victory. He had some great moments, and too often we think quarterbacks can lift teams by themselves. But they can’t. However, one playoff win is one playoff win. I expected more out of Cutler when I first saw him play in Denver a decade ago.
* * *
Draft Leftovers
The Titans started a wide receiver run when they made Corey Davis the No. 5 overall pick. Two more were gone in the next four picks
Photo: Elsa/Getty Images
• Every year there are some players with injury questions, and some players ruled undraftable due to injury concerns. There were many this year, and most teams pushed two Alabama players (defensive lineman Jonathan Allen, linebacker Reuben Foster) down the draft board because of shoulder issues. I’ll preface this by saying in 1980 the Cincinnati Bengals drafted USC tackle Anthony Muñoz third overall despite the fact that an injured knee caused 14 NFL teams to flunk him on his physical.
Muñoz became one of the great offensive linemen of all time. Before the draft, one smart scout told me his team wouldn’t draft Foster; the team feared his postseason rotator-cuff surgery would have to be re-done. The Niners, before Foster’s medical re-check with the team, labeled him a 2-minus on their medical scale, meaning they had concerns requiring another examination. After that examination, team physical Dr. Timothy McAdams and the Niners were satisfied with Foster’s healing, GM John Lynch said, and the medical grade was changed to a 2-plus.
“He’ll be fine for training camp,” Lynch said. “We feel as strong as ever about his health, and really, we’ve never wavered. Our medical people are confident in him.” Foster’s shoulder will be monitored as closely as any injury entering training camp, because of everything said about it before the draft and since.
• Many in the league were stunned to see Western Michigan receiver Corey Davis go as high as the fifth pick, where Tennessee took him. We’ll see if that ends up working out for the Titans. But with the draft riches he’s accumulated, and knowing wide receiver was his top priority, GM Jon Robinson figured it was smarter to take his top wideout at five rather than risk missing on the top three before he had a chance to make another pick.
Sure enough, Mike Williams went to the Chargers at seven and John Ross to Cincinnati at nine. And there was the run of the top three wideouts, finished in the first nine picks.
• Arizona and San Francisco and the Jets (and perhaps Cleveland, depending on the rookie season of DeShone Kizer) pushed off their quarterback-of-the-future choices until 2018, when vets Kirk Cousins of Washington and Jimmy Garappolo of New England could be free agents, and the college crop of passers could be better than this year. I like that.
• I covered the New York Giants in the ’80s and wrote about first-round draft pick George Adams, a running back from Kentucky who struggled because of a hip injury for much of his career. He wore number 33. His son, LSU safety Jamal Adams, got drafted by the cross-stadium New York Jets, also in the first round, this year. Jamal’s number with the Jets: 33. “It’s always been a family number,” Jamal Adams said.
• Applause to the Browns, for closing ranks in the first round and keeping alive the perception that they might trade from 12 to two to pick up North Carolina quarterback Mitchell Trubisky. That, in part, forced the Bears, who wanted Trubisky badly, to deal from three to two and throw in a third draft choice to assure they’d get their man. The Browns at times have been a leaky sieve during drafts. Not this time.
• I repeat: As I pointed out in my column inside the 49ers draft room last Monday, most often when a team gets on the clock during the draft, the other 31 teams don’t know which player that team is going to choose. So it’s easy to kill the Bears for trading three picks to move one spot. Easy, and short-sighted.
• The Jags fell into left tackle Cam Robinson with the 34th pick, and I make him the favorite to beat out Branden Albert (who’s not been at Jacksonville’s offseason program) for the starting left tackle job. Tom Coughlin’s not a big fan of wildcat-strikers.
• Underplayed story of the draft: Seattle drafting a corner (Shaquill Griffin) and three safeties (Delano Hill, Tedric Thompson, Mike Tyson), respectively, at 90, 95, 111 and 187 overall, a clarion call to the not-as-young-as-they-used-to-be back end of the defense—Earl Thomas (age 28), Kam Chancellor (29) and Richard Sherman (29).
* * *
The 1972 Dolphins Are Crumbling
Nick Buoniconti still looks sharp in public appearances, but his doctors believe his Dolphins playing days have taken a major toll on his health
Photo: Getty Images (2)
This week in Sports Illustrated, the magazine is running a story that will really move you, and I wanted to bring you a taste of that story here; The MMQB will run it in its entirety on Tuesday, plus a sort of spinoff tale on Wednesday. You’ve read before about the cracks in the NFL veneer, the old vets, so many of them in a bad state. But what writer Scott Price found is a really punishing story about the man at the heart of the defense for the revered, undefeated 1972 Dolphins.
Nick Buoniconti is now 76, and his body is just completely falling apart, to the point where something like putting on a T-shirt is not just complicated—it’s near impossible. Nick and his wife, Lynn, shared a video with The MMQB, and you can take a look below at just where this old Hall of Famer is today.
Here’s what’s different: This story isn’t Nick Buoniconti has CTE. We’re not at that point yet with the science. This is, Nick Buoniconti’s doctors know something is really wrong with his brain…but no one can tell him anything definitively, and that’s a terrifying place for anyone.
What’s even scarier: Nick brought that story to SI, and when Scott started looking around that revered team he found more of the same. We’ll get to Jim Kiick (the running back who scored every rushing touchdown for Miami in that ’72 postseason) on Wednesday, but first here’s an excerpt of the Buoniconti story, which we’ll give you in full at The MMQB on Tuesday.
“Teddy!” Nick Buoniconti yells across the lobby of The Inn at Spanish Bay, near Pebble Beach.
It is a November Sunday in 2016, past twilight. The Hall of Fame linebacker, 75, but only slightly bent, is sitting with his wife, Lynn, at a polished table. The fresh faces behind the front desk don’t know Buoniconti; it has been 44 years since he co-captained the Dolphins to three straight Super Bowl seasons. He’s not alone: Nearly two dozen greats from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s are here, wandering through the lobby toward the Grand Ballroom for the 26th annual Legends Invitational dinner.
In the next few hours a roster of venerables will pass through—Paul Warfield, Jan Stenerud, Jim Hart—and each will utter a small shock at being remembered at all. This will at first seem odd, but it makes sense once they speak of how they missed out on free agency, or spent years fighting the league for better pensions, or are scrambling now to hack through the thicket of the NFL’s $1 billion concussion lawsuit settlement.
“Teddy!” Buoniconti yells again, and over comes Ted Hendricks, 69, along with his longtime partner, Linda Babl. Hendricks, the 6’7” linebacker, played 15 years in the NFL, partied epically and never missed a game. Nick and Lynn stand.
“How are you doing, Teddy?” Lynn asks.
“Good,” says Ted, grinning. At that, Buoniconti unleashes a deep sigh, one so operatic that at first it seems involuntary; but later, after spending hours with him, one comes to know it as his fallback signal of dismay and, quite often, a looming explosion. Linda’s head pivots.
“How’ve you been?” she says.
Buoniconti doesn’t explain that he can’t figure out how to knot a tie or towel his back. He doesn’t speak of his increasingly useless left hand, the increasingly frequent trips to the emergency room or how, just a few days earlier, he hurtled backwards down a staircase and sprayed blood all over the hardwood, screaming afterward at Lynn, “I should just kill myself! It doesn’t matter!”
“You know,” Buoniconti says.
And he’s right. Like most everyone who’s close to a former NFL player, Linda is living some variation of the same story. They’ve all seen the big-budget concussion movie and the news clips; they’ve read about the deaths of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson; they’re comparing notes on Facebook about the damage caused by repeated head trauma. They study their men. They accompany them to brain studies and name-drop superstar CTE researchers.
“We went to see Dr. [Julian] Bailes last month,” Linda says. “He’s really impressive, as far as one-to-one.”
Buoniconti releases another sigh.
It’s so random. Hendricks has only minor memory lapses. Some of Buoniconti’s Dolphins teammates, meanwhile, are crumbling. Quarterback Earl Morrall, the supersub so key to the Perfect Season, died at 79, in 2014, with Stage 4 CTE. Running back Jim Kiick, 70, lived in squalor until he was put in an assisted care facility last summer with dementia/early onset Alzheimer’s. Bill Stanfill, a defensive end who long suffered from dementia, died in November at 69.
“Everybody’s searching,” Buoniconti says, dropping his voice. “Some go to North Carolina, some to BU, some to UCLA. And it’s all related. That’s why it’s so unnecessary, what the NFL is putting the players through by making us document the neurological deficiencies. Not everybody can afford to go through that. And they say they’ll pay for it—but do you know what that’s like, actually getting the money?”
Ted and Linda leave for the ballroom. Nick and Lynn sit. Hall of Fame Vikings defensive end Chris Doleman stops by. He talks about how even the most familiar routines have become confounding, how he wakes up in his own bed wondering, Am I in a hotel? “And I’m 55,” he says.
“At 55 I was very normal,” Buoniconti says. “I’m not normal anymore.”
This is hard, at times, to believe. Everyone tells Nick he looks “great.” Indeed, he’ll soon get up before a packed ballroom and emcee the night’s program, tick off the names of every co-host, sponsor and speaker, tell war stories.
But few saw Buoniconti teeter as he walked off the stage, perhaps because of the atrophy to his right frontal cortex. Fewer noticed Nick motioning for Lynn as he bolted from the ballroom, perhaps because of his neurodegenerative dementia—or the yet-unspoken opinion that his condition could actually be corticobasal syndrome, complicated by an atypical Parkinsonian Syndrome or CTE or Alzheimer’s. He had to pee. And Lynn had to stand by to unbutton and unzip him and ensure that he’d emerge from the men’s room dry and unexposed.
And no one here saw him before all that, when Buoniconti stood up in the hotel lobby and headed toward the ballroom. “I feel lost,” he said. “I feel like a child.”
The full version of Price’s story on Buoniconti is here at this link...
http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/05/08/...cognitive-decline-nfl-head-trauma-concussions
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Three Post-Draft Questions for Gil Brandt
Brandt has been involved with the NFL draft since 1960, as a young pup with the Dallas Cowboys. Now, traipsing from combine to pro day to pro day to the draft, he gathers information from every team in the game, and herds the top prospects around at the draft.
MMQB: Pretty surprising draft. What surprised you the most?
Brandt: Nothing. Actually, no surprises to me. Two weeks before the draft, I knew there would be a bunch of picks that would shock people. I said then that the eighth pick in this draft could be someone else’s 50th-ranked player, and the 50th player for another team could be your eighth guy.
MMQB: Do you think the Bears made a bad trade, dealing two threes and a four to move up one spot for Mitchell Trubisky in the first round?
Brandt: No. Everyone has what-ifs in every draft. I’m not sure San Francisco didn’t play blind man’s bluff a little bit, but whatever they did, Chicago couldn’t know exactly what was going to happen if they don’t move up to two. I think the Bears were concerned Cleveland had all that ammunition and could move up.
Plus, the agent [for Trubisky] was making it clear he knew his guy would go second. I understand what [Chicago GM] Ryan Pace went through. If you’re not proactive in this league, you die. Without a quarterback, you can’t win. The thing about everybody saying Chicago made a bad move … all those people, if they’re wrong, we’ll never see a retraction. And no one knows now whether it’s a good move or bad move.
MMQB: It seemed like Dallas was the favorite to host the 2018 draft until the league saw the job Philadelphia did. You live in Dallas. You love Dallas. Thoughts on where the draft will be next year?
Brandt: As much as I want the draft to come to Dallas, it’s going to be very hard for Philadelphia to lose the draft after the job that city did. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. That city did a job that was off the charts. And the fans were so great—100,000 people that one day, and I bet there were 99,999 different jerseys, with fans from everywhere.
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• San Francisco CEO Jed York, on whether he regrets not signing Jim Harbaugh to a contract extension before their ugly divorce:
“We tried a lot of times to get an extension done with Jim, and for whatever reason those didn’t culminate. And, ultimately, as successful as it was here, I think Jim is very happy, and he’s doing an unbelievable job at Michigan. We obviously didn’t have success after Jim left. I don’t know that we’d be sitting here with John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan if something happened. And I don’t know if it would have worked long-term if we did get something done.
I regret how we performed the last two years. I regret how the relationship was frayed between me and a coach that did a lot of great things for this franchise. And I actually talked to his brother [Ravens head coach] John [Harbaugh] briefly at the owner’s meetings, and he said, ‘You know, you guys need to get together sometime and have dinner.’ And I said, ‘I’d love to do that.’ I’d love to get together. And I think enough time has kind of passed where you can let whatever issues that were there be buried and just truly be thankful for three great years.
When nobody expected us, certainly in 2011, to beat the Saints the way we did. To get close and be two muffed punts away from going to a Super Bowl in ’11. And just all the things that happened. You know, I’d love to sit down with Jim. Not in front of cameras, not in front of anybody else, but just share an evening with him and truly say thank you. And wish him the best of luck.”
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Things I Think I Think
1. I think we’re left to wonder what-if with Jay Cutler. A lot.
2. I think this is the first what-if: What if he’d signed with Houston, and hands-on quarterback coach Bill O’Brien, this off-season? One of the things about Cutler I’ll miss is the last act of his NFL career—I was pretty sure there would be one, and now it seems unlikely.
Had he gone to Houston, for instance, we’d have been able to see him with good receivers and buttressed by a top-three NFL defense; he wouldn’t have had to be bombs-away Cutler to have a chance to win. I’d have loved to see him play with O’Brien. They’d have butted heads a few time, for sure, but O’Brien would have liked Cutler’s attitude and toughness.
A decade ago I was working on an assignment for Sports Illustrated before Cutler’s first starting season in Denver (after a rookie year in which he’d played some), and Mike Shanahan, his coach, told me this: “Jay thinks he’s just good, but he’s better than good. As time goes on, I think he’ll be great. You know why? He’s not afraid to stand in there and make plays and throw it downfield.
Some quarterbacks, not mentioning names, want to dump it all the time rather than look downfield because the pressure of the game is so great or because they want to protect their quarterback rating. The guys who have confidence, who really believe in themselves, want to be Elway. You can teach a guy to dump the ball off. You can’t teach a Vanderbilt guy to be the MVP of the SEC, which Jay was. He’s got to have something inside him to accomplish that.” That guy was still there. Is still there.
3. I think this is the second what-if: I always will think that Cutler unnecessarily picked a fight with rookie coach Josh McDaniels in 2009 that got him traded from Denver to Chicago. Stupid move by Cutler—even in retrospect, dissing owner Pat Bowlen at the time, and even though McDaniels made some huge mistakes in his ill-fated tenure.
What if Cutler stayed in Denver, and been willing to be coached by McDaniels the way Tom Brady has been willing to be coached by McDaniels? Cutler’s career in Denver could have changed drastically.
4. I think I just realized something about all the ESPN layoffs, thinking about my football Sunday: Do not, I repeat do not, tell me that the “NFL Matchup” show is in danger. That is the one staple to my Sunday morning that I simply cannot do without.
Smart football, put into words the average fan can understand, by really smart and likeable football people—Ron Jaworski, Merril Hoge, Sal Paolantonio. I love that show. It educates without talking down to people. It is a vital part of my football week. ESPN: It must stay. It simply must stay.
5. I think Christian McCaffrey made a few positive impressions at the Panthers’ rookie camp, particularly when he was split wide and ran efficient and fast routes. One impression came after he signed his rookie contract, with $10.7 million in signing bonuses, meaning, if he handles life right, he’ll have some form of security for the rest of his life.
“He celebrated by going to bed,” Joe Person of the Charlotte Observer reported. Said McCaffrey: “I signed, tried to get some sleep to get ready for [practice]. Never get comfortable.”
6. I think Phil Simms has handled his demotion a lot better than I’d handle mine.
7. I think this was the most interesting statement I have heard in the past week. It came from Gil Brandt, when we were talking about the 49ers’ draft, and I asked him about Alabama linebacker Reuben Foster, selected 31st overall by the Niners. “Foster’s the most competitive linebacker I’ve seen come out of the draft since Jack Lambert,” said Brandt, who has studied 58 drafts.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/05/08/jay-cutler-tv-nfl-quarterbacks-offseason-draft-peter-king
Jay Cutler and the Odd Offseason of QB Movement
With the sullen ex-Bear heading to TV, it’s a good time to reset how nonsensical the situations under center have become. Plus more draft fallout, an NBA GM talks football and the sad state of a ’72 Dolphins star
by Peter King
Friday capped the strangest quarterback off-season I can remember. That’s when Jay Cutler, a C-plus quarterback with four or five years left in him (or so we thought) surprised a quarterback-needy league by jumping to the Fox broadcast booth.
Not only is it downright weird to think of the perennially sour Cutler as some future aw-shucks Collinsworth. It’s weirder to think of the 34-year-old Cutler as not good enough to start anymore in the NFL. And weirder still to think of the employed and unemployed at the most important position in sports.
THEY’RE STARTING
Tom Savage, Houston. Six years ago, he lost the job at Rutgers. After Brock Osweiler flunked out, and after Tony Romo picked TV over football, and after the Texans passed on the acidic Cutler, Savage, with two career starts and zero career touchdown passes, will try to hold off first-round rookie Deshaun Watson through a medium-tough September (Jags, at Bengals, at Patriots).
Tom Savage and Cody Kessler (left) will have starting quarterback jobs in 2017; Jay Cutler and Tony Romo will not
Photo: Getty Images (4)
Cody Kessler, Cleveland. The 2016 third-rounder showed promise last year, if you call not turning the ball over while going 0-8 “promise.” He should hold off rookie DeShone Kizer for a while, but such is life on the Browns quarterback depth chart that Kessler might not even be a Brown nine months from now.
Browns quarterback interlude
Cleveland’s QB depth chart in early May of recent seasons
2017: Cody Kessler, Kevin Hogan, DeShone Kizer, Brock Osweiler.
2016: Robert Griffin III, Josh McCown, Cody Kessler, Austin Davis, Connor Shaw, Pat Devlin.
2015: Josh McCown, Johnny Manziel, Thaddeus Lewis, Connor Shaw.
2014: Brian Hoyer, Johnny Manziel, Tyler Thigpen, Connor Shaw.
2013: Brandon Weeden, Jason Campbell, Thaddeus Lewis.
Five Mays. Fifteen different quarterbacks.
Mike Glennon, Chicago. He last started a game three years ago, and the Bears showed so much faith in him that they used four draft choices to move up to pick the rookie quarterback that GM Ryan Pace thinks will replace him, Mitchell Trubisky.
Brian Hoyer, San Francisco. After looking scared in a four-pick playoff embarrassment for Houston 16 months ago, Hoyer slightly redeemed himself in a five-start, 67-percent relief stint with the Bears last year. Still, he’s a Kyle Shanahan stopgap with the Niners.
Josh McCown, New York Jets. The stats don’t show it, but he’s a good quarterback to have on the roster, a team-first guy who might be best suited getting Bryce Petty or Christian Hackenberg ready to play. Whoever plays, the Jets will be in the quarterback market in 2018. All in, in fact.
THEY’RE NOT STARTING
Tony Romo. He knows he could have quarterbacked Houston if he wanted to. But he got a once-in-a-decade offer—walking off the field into a network’s top analyst job, for CBS—which sped his decision.
Jay Cutler. More below. The man with 134 more career passing yards than Kurt Warner and 14 more career touchdown passes than Ken Stabler drew scant interest from the only team that made sense—Houston. That probably told him everything. Cutler’s legacy will be that he underachieved (11 years, one playoff win) while being the most media-repellant quarterback of his era.
Colin Kaepernick. So Kaepernick has bought a place in downtown Manhattan and lives in the big city fairly anonymously. I spent a long draft weekend with the Niners in California, and there are those in the building who think Kaepernick might actually rather do social justice work full-time than play quarterback. He emerges in New York City occasionally for noble cause work, last week donating 100 men’s suits to a parole office in Queens, so recipients, recently out of prison, would look more presentable when going on job interviews.
I haven’t talked to Kaepernick, so I have no idea what his gut is telling him about what to do with his life. But it’s crazy that a quarterback who four years ago was coming off a Super Bowl appearance and looked to be a long-term answer has no team now and no hot NFL prospects that anyone can see.
If I were a pro scout or a GM with a starting or backup quarterback need, I’d be on a plane to New York to have lunch with Kaepernick to ask him where he sees his life going. And if he sees a football future, and if I had a great quarterback coach (Sean McVay with the Rams, Bruce Arians in Arizona), I’d sign him to an incentive-laden contract. Right now.
Robert Griffin III. He’s been unemployed for two months after the Browns cut him. The career of the 2012 Offensive Rookie of the Year is in more jeopardy than Kaepernick’s. Regardless of what he, his family or Washington owner Daniel Snyder thinks, Griffin’s biggest error was being the anti-Brady.
Instead of simply being willing to be coached hard by proven quarterback developers Mike and Kyle Shanahan (and I understand all the divisive tributaries that go along with that), Griffin and his family thought they knew best. The resulting wedge driven between him and his coaches, on top of the knee injury he suffered in the playoffs in January 2013, have been factors he hasn’t recovered from.
Texans Quarterback Interlude
Romo, Cutler, Kaepernick and Griffin have all played in the playoffs in the past six years. The Texans have engaged none in serious contract discussions this off-season.
Ryan Fitzpatrick. Not so stunning he’s on the street. But like McCown, he’s a smart, low-ego guy who’d be a good fit on a team developing a young quarterback.
Here’s the commonality I see: The five teams with weak or unproven starters (Browns, Jets, Texans, Bears, 49ers) all have coaches who want to do it their way—developing players they want to build around. Hue Jackson’s that way. Kyle Shanahan and Bill O’Brien too. And GMs Mike Maccagnan of the Jets and Ryan Pace of the Bears have made it clear they prefer to develop their quarterback of the future, either through the draft or by signing a young free-agent with a spotless record who is totally devoted to football.
Fair or unfair, Cutler’s got a reputation of being an island. When Hue Jackson coached Oakland, he wanted to draft Kaepernick but was trumped by the Niners; now Jackson has shown zero interest in Kaepernick. Coaches want team guys, and they want football devotees. Not all great quarterbacks have had those traits, but look at teams that were desperate for quarterbacks entering this off-season. Houston and Cleveland chose to draft college players with question marks.
Watson and Kizer, those teams figured, will be devoted to football, clay willing to be molded. We’ll see if those choices work. But if you’d told me three months ago the NFL would open 2017 with Romo, Cutler and Kaepernick in occupations other than football, I’d have been stunned.
* * *
On Jay Cutler Taking the Color Job with FOX
Photo: Elsa/Getty Images
Quite a few thoughts, actually:
• Players who have been crappy with the media have gone to work for TV and been good at it. Sterling Sharpe, for one. You know why Sharpe was better than anyone thought he’d be? Because he didn’t care who he skewered, in part. As a player, Cutler had an acidic personality. He was a Negative Nate. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be bad at TV. It actually means he’s got a real chance to be good, if he works at it and stays true to his real opinions.
• What convinced Fox execs in the Cutler audition that he would be good enough to plug in for John Lynch on its number two NFL team? Sounds like it was two things, from the audition Cutler had in Los Angeles with play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt two weeks ago, when they sat in a quiet room on the Fox lot and voiced-over the Arizona-Seattle game from Christmas Eve. “Just being conversational,” Burkhardt said Friday.
“Knowing when to talk and when to shut up. Some guys talk, talk, talk, talk. Jay said his piece and just stopped.” And being prescient, just watching the game. On one play, near the Arizona goal line, Cutler piped up that the pass play failed because Jermaine Kearse was supposed to “rub,” or legally screen, the defensive back, and he missed the rub, and the ball fell incomplete. “There was another play, Carson Palmer to J.J. Nelson for an 80-yard touchdown, that Jay made a great observation,” Burkhardt said. “As soon as they got to the line, Jay knew it.
He said Palmer used his eyes perfectly to move the safety and keep him away from where he wanted to throw. When we got to the last replay, there was a head-on shot of Palmer’s eyes, and then he looked left right at the snap, and Nelson was to the right, and Palmer held the safety there. Palmer threw the bomb and the safety couldn’t get back in time to make the play. Overall, he had some really cool minutiae. He was so conversational.”
• Could Cutler play again? Who knows. “It seemed to me he’s checked out of football emotionally,” Burkhardt said. It’s odd that he isn’t playing, to be sure, but think of this from Cutler’s perspective. He’s made $73 million in the last five years alone. He doesn’t need a big payday. And for much of his eight seasons in Chicago, he’s been beat up behind a shaky offensive line.
Imagine talking to the Jets, for instance, or even Houston, and playing again behind a porous offensive line. With the Jets, he had to be thinking: Okay, I’ll make good money, and I’ll lose, and I’ll get sacked a lot. (And, though I doubt he was thinking this, add in this P.S.: He’d get the crap ripped out of him on the back pages of the tabloids as long as the Jets lost.)
Why do that? Hard to think that would be a lot of fun, particularly considering you could make decent money sitting up in a booth—and maybe discovering a new vocation you actually might like.
• I didn’t know Cutler well, and hadn’t talked to him much since he was with the Bears. But I always thought he blew some good chances in getting to know some of the former quarterbacks who did his games. Troy Aikman, Dan Fouts, Phil Simms, Steve Beuerlein. Cutler used to view those production meetings as necessary evils instead of using them to draw knowledge out of those guys. Cutler was a little too smart for his own good.
• Thought the best game I ever saw Cutler play was on a Monday night in October 2011, when the mediocre Bears faced the then-unbeaten Lions in Detroit and Cutler, in a loss, played as valiantly as a quarterback could play. The Detroit front seven (Ndamukong Suh, Nick Fairley, Kyle Vanden Bosch, Cliff Avril, Lawrence Jackson, etc.) must have hit him 20 times that night.
He had not a moment’s peace. But he completed 28 of 38 passes, threw no picks, and hung in against the most brutal of rushes. Chicago lost, but I thought that was the game of games in a career that had more disappointment than success.
• Eleven seasons, one playoff victory. He had some great moments, and too often we think quarterbacks can lift teams by themselves. But they can’t. However, one playoff win is one playoff win. I expected more out of Cutler when I first saw him play in Denver a decade ago.
* * *
Draft Leftovers
The Titans started a wide receiver run when they made Corey Davis the No. 5 overall pick. Two more were gone in the next four picks
Photo: Elsa/Getty Images
• Every year there are some players with injury questions, and some players ruled undraftable due to injury concerns. There were many this year, and most teams pushed two Alabama players (defensive lineman Jonathan Allen, linebacker Reuben Foster) down the draft board because of shoulder issues. I’ll preface this by saying in 1980 the Cincinnati Bengals drafted USC tackle Anthony Muñoz third overall despite the fact that an injured knee caused 14 NFL teams to flunk him on his physical.
Muñoz became one of the great offensive linemen of all time. Before the draft, one smart scout told me his team wouldn’t draft Foster; the team feared his postseason rotator-cuff surgery would have to be re-done. The Niners, before Foster’s medical re-check with the team, labeled him a 2-minus on their medical scale, meaning they had concerns requiring another examination. After that examination, team physical Dr. Timothy McAdams and the Niners were satisfied with Foster’s healing, GM John Lynch said, and the medical grade was changed to a 2-plus.
“He’ll be fine for training camp,” Lynch said. “We feel as strong as ever about his health, and really, we’ve never wavered. Our medical people are confident in him.” Foster’s shoulder will be monitored as closely as any injury entering training camp, because of everything said about it before the draft and since.
• Many in the league were stunned to see Western Michigan receiver Corey Davis go as high as the fifth pick, where Tennessee took him. We’ll see if that ends up working out for the Titans. But with the draft riches he’s accumulated, and knowing wide receiver was his top priority, GM Jon Robinson figured it was smarter to take his top wideout at five rather than risk missing on the top three before he had a chance to make another pick.
Sure enough, Mike Williams went to the Chargers at seven and John Ross to Cincinnati at nine. And there was the run of the top three wideouts, finished in the first nine picks.
• Arizona and San Francisco and the Jets (and perhaps Cleveland, depending on the rookie season of DeShone Kizer) pushed off their quarterback-of-the-future choices until 2018, when vets Kirk Cousins of Washington and Jimmy Garappolo of New England could be free agents, and the college crop of passers could be better than this year. I like that.
• I covered the New York Giants in the ’80s and wrote about first-round draft pick George Adams, a running back from Kentucky who struggled because of a hip injury for much of his career. He wore number 33. His son, LSU safety Jamal Adams, got drafted by the cross-stadium New York Jets, also in the first round, this year. Jamal’s number with the Jets: 33. “It’s always been a family number,” Jamal Adams said.
• Applause to the Browns, for closing ranks in the first round and keeping alive the perception that they might trade from 12 to two to pick up North Carolina quarterback Mitchell Trubisky. That, in part, forced the Bears, who wanted Trubisky badly, to deal from three to two and throw in a third draft choice to assure they’d get their man. The Browns at times have been a leaky sieve during drafts. Not this time.
• I repeat: As I pointed out in my column inside the 49ers draft room last Monday, most often when a team gets on the clock during the draft, the other 31 teams don’t know which player that team is going to choose. So it’s easy to kill the Bears for trading three picks to move one spot. Easy, and short-sighted.
• The Jags fell into left tackle Cam Robinson with the 34th pick, and I make him the favorite to beat out Branden Albert (who’s not been at Jacksonville’s offseason program) for the starting left tackle job. Tom Coughlin’s not a big fan of wildcat-strikers.
• Underplayed story of the draft: Seattle drafting a corner (Shaquill Griffin) and three safeties (Delano Hill, Tedric Thompson, Mike Tyson), respectively, at 90, 95, 111 and 187 overall, a clarion call to the not-as-young-as-they-used-to-be back end of the defense—Earl Thomas (age 28), Kam Chancellor (29) and Richard Sherman (29).
* * *
The 1972 Dolphins Are Crumbling
Nick Buoniconti still looks sharp in public appearances, but his doctors believe his Dolphins playing days have taken a major toll on his health
Photo: Getty Images (2)
This week in Sports Illustrated, the magazine is running a story that will really move you, and I wanted to bring you a taste of that story here; The MMQB will run it in its entirety on Tuesday, plus a sort of spinoff tale on Wednesday. You’ve read before about the cracks in the NFL veneer, the old vets, so many of them in a bad state. But what writer Scott Price found is a really punishing story about the man at the heart of the defense for the revered, undefeated 1972 Dolphins.
Nick Buoniconti is now 76, and his body is just completely falling apart, to the point where something like putting on a T-shirt is not just complicated—it’s near impossible. Nick and his wife, Lynn, shared a video with The MMQB, and you can take a look below at just where this old Hall of Famer is today.
Here’s what’s different: This story isn’t Nick Buoniconti has CTE. We’re not at that point yet with the science. This is, Nick Buoniconti’s doctors know something is really wrong with his brain…but no one can tell him anything definitively, and that’s a terrifying place for anyone.
What’s even scarier: Nick brought that story to SI, and when Scott started looking around that revered team he found more of the same. We’ll get to Jim Kiick (the running back who scored every rushing touchdown for Miami in that ’72 postseason) on Wednesday, but first here’s an excerpt of the Buoniconti story, which we’ll give you in full at The MMQB on Tuesday.
“Teddy!” Nick Buoniconti yells across the lobby of The Inn at Spanish Bay, near Pebble Beach.
It is a November Sunday in 2016, past twilight. The Hall of Fame linebacker, 75, but only slightly bent, is sitting with his wife, Lynn, at a polished table. The fresh faces behind the front desk don’t know Buoniconti; it has been 44 years since he co-captained the Dolphins to three straight Super Bowl seasons. He’s not alone: Nearly two dozen greats from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s are here, wandering through the lobby toward the Grand Ballroom for the 26th annual Legends Invitational dinner.
In the next few hours a roster of venerables will pass through—Paul Warfield, Jan Stenerud, Jim Hart—and each will utter a small shock at being remembered at all. This will at first seem odd, but it makes sense once they speak of how they missed out on free agency, or spent years fighting the league for better pensions, or are scrambling now to hack through the thicket of the NFL’s $1 billion concussion lawsuit settlement.
“Teddy!” Buoniconti yells again, and over comes Ted Hendricks, 69, along with his longtime partner, Linda Babl. Hendricks, the 6’7” linebacker, played 15 years in the NFL, partied epically and never missed a game. Nick and Lynn stand.
“How are you doing, Teddy?” Lynn asks.
“Good,” says Ted, grinning. At that, Buoniconti unleashes a deep sigh, one so operatic that at first it seems involuntary; but later, after spending hours with him, one comes to know it as his fallback signal of dismay and, quite often, a looming explosion. Linda’s head pivots.
“How’ve you been?” she says.
Buoniconti doesn’t explain that he can’t figure out how to knot a tie or towel his back. He doesn’t speak of his increasingly useless left hand, the increasingly frequent trips to the emergency room or how, just a few days earlier, he hurtled backwards down a staircase and sprayed blood all over the hardwood, screaming afterward at Lynn, “I should just kill myself! It doesn’t matter!”
“You know,” Buoniconti says.
And he’s right. Like most everyone who’s close to a former NFL player, Linda is living some variation of the same story. They’ve all seen the big-budget concussion movie and the news clips; they’ve read about the deaths of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson; they’re comparing notes on Facebook about the damage caused by repeated head trauma. They study their men. They accompany them to brain studies and name-drop superstar CTE researchers.
“We went to see Dr. [Julian] Bailes last month,” Linda says. “He’s really impressive, as far as one-to-one.”
Buoniconti releases another sigh.
It’s so random. Hendricks has only minor memory lapses. Some of Buoniconti’s Dolphins teammates, meanwhile, are crumbling. Quarterback Earl Morrall, the supersub so key to the Perfect Season, died at 79, in 2014, with Stage 4 CTE. Running back Jim Kiick, 70, lived in squalor until he was put in an assisted care facility last summer with dementia/early onset Alzheimer’s. Bill Stanfill, a defensive end who long suffered from dementia, died in November at 69.
“Everybody’s searching,” Buoniconti says, dropping his voice. “Some go to North Carolina, some to BU, some to UCLA. And it’s all related. That’s why it’s so unnecessary, what the NFL is putting the players through by making us document the neurological deficiencies. Not everybody can afford to go through that. And they say they’ll pay for it—but do you know what that’s like, actually getting the money?”
Ted and Linda leave for the ballroom. Nick and Lynn sit. Hall of Fame Vikings defensive end Chris Doleman stops by. He talks about how even the most familiar routines have become confounding, how he wakes up in his own bed wondering, Am I in a hotel? “And I’m 55,” he says.
“At 55 I was very normal,” Buoniconti says. “I’m not normal anymore.”
This is hard, at times, to believe. Everyone tells Nick he looks “great.” Indeed, he’ll soon get up before a packed ballroom and emcee the night’s program, tick off the names of every co-host, sponsor and speaker, tell war stories.
But few saw Buoniconti teeter as he walked off the stage, perhaps because of the atrophy to his right frontal cortex. Fewer noticed Nick motioning for Lynn as he bolted from the ballroom, perhaps because of his neurodegenerative dementia—or the yet-unspoken opinion that his condition could actually be corticobasal syndrome, complicated by an atypical Parkinsonian Syndrome or CTE or Alzheimer’s. He had to pee. And Lynn had to stand by to unbutton and unzip him and ensure that he’d emerge from the men’s room dry and unexposed.
And no one here saw him before all that, when Buoniconti stood up in the hotel lobby and headed toward the ballroom. “I feel lost,” he said. “I feel like a child.”
The full version of Price’s story on Buoniconti is here at this link...
http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/05/08/...cognitive-decline-nfl-head-trauma-concussions
* * *
Three Post-Draft Questions for Gil Brandt
Brandt has been involved with the NFL draft since 1960, as a young pup with the Dallas Cowboys. Now, traipsing from combine to pro day to pro day to the draft, he gathers information from every team in the game, and herds the top prospects around at the draft.
MMQB: Pretty surprising draft. What surprised you the most?
Brandt: Nothing. Actually, no surprises to me. Two weeks before the draft, I knew there would be a bunch of picks that would shock people. I said then that the eighth pick in this draft could be someone else’s 50th-ranked player, and the 50th player for another team could be your eighth guy.
MMQB: Do you think the Bears made a bad trade, dealing two threes and a four to move up one spot for Mitchell Trubisky in the first round?
Brandt: No. Everyone has what-ifs in every draft. I’m not sure San Francisco didn’t play blind man’s bluff a little bit, but whatever they did, Chicago couldn’t know exactly what was going to happen if they don’t move up to two. I think the Bears were concerned Cleveland had all that ammunition and could move up.
Plus, the agent [for Trubisky] was making it clear he knew his guy would go second. I understand what [Chicago GM] Ryan Pace went through. If you’re not proactive in this league, you die. Without a quarterback, you can’t win. The thing about everybody saying Chicago made a bad move … all those people, if they’re wrong, we’ll never see a retraction. And no one knows now whether it’s a good move or bad move.
MMQB: It seemed like Dallas was the favorite to host the 2018 draft until the league saw the job Philadelphia did. You live in Dallas. You love Dallas. Thoughts on where the draft will be next year?
Brandt: As much as I want the draft to come to Dallas, it’s going to be very hard for Philadelphia to lose the draft after the job that city did. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. That city did a job that was off the charts. And the fans were so great—100,000 people that one day, and I bet there were 99,999 different jerseys, with fans from everywhere.
* * *
• San Francisco CEO Jed York, on whether he regrets not signing Jim Harbaugh to a contract extension before their ugly divorce:
“We tried a lot of times to get an extension done with Jim, and for whatever reason those didn’t culminate. And, ultimately, as successful as it was here, I think Jim is very happy, and he’s doing an unbelievable job at Michigan. We obviously didn’t have success after Jim left. I don’t know that we’d be sitting here with John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan if something happened. And I don’t know if it would have worked long-term if we did get something done.
I regret how we performed the last two years. I regret how the relationship was frayed between me and a coach that did a lot of great things for this franchise. And I actually talked to his brother [Ravens head coach] John [Harbaugh] briefly at the owner’s meetings, and he said, ‘You know, you guys need to get together sometime and have dinner.’ And I said, ‘I’d love to do that.’ I’d love to get together. And I think enough time has kind of passed where you can let whatever issues that were there be buried and just truly be thankful for three great years.
When nobody expected us, certainly in 2011, to beat the Saints the way we did. To get close and be two muffed punts away from going to a Super Bowl in ’11. And just all the things that happened. You know, I’d love to sit down with Jim. Not in front of cameras, not in front of anybody else, but just share an evening with him and truly say thank you. And wish him the best of luck.”
* * *
Things I Think I Think
1. I think we’re left to wonder what-if with Jay Cutler. A lot.
2. I think this is the first what-if: What if he’d signed with Houston, and hands-on quarterback coach Bill O’Brien, this off-season? One of the things about Cutler I’ll miss is the last act of his NFL career—I was pretty sure there would be one, and now it seems unlikely.
Had he gone to Houston, for instance, we’d have been able to see him with good receivers and buttressed by a top-three NFL defense; he wouldn’t have had to be bombs-away Cutler to have a chance to win. I’d have loved to see him play with O’Brien. They’d have butted heads a few time, for sure, but O’Brien would have liked Cutler’s attitude and toughness.
A decade ago I was working on an assignment for Sports Illustrated before Cutler’s first starting season in Denver (after a rookie year in which he’d played some), and Mike Shanahan, his coach, told me this: “Jay thinks he’s just good, but he’s better than good. As time goes on, I think he’ll be great. You know why? He’s not afraid to stand in there and make plays and throw it downfield.
Some quarterbacks, not mentioning names, want to dump it all the time rather than look downfield because the pressure of the game is so great or because they want to protect their quarterback rating. The guys who have confidence, who really believe in themselves, want to be Elway. You can teach a guy to dump the ball off. You can’t teach a Vanderbilt guy to be the MVP of the SEC, which Jay was. He’s got to have something inside him to accomplish that.” That guy was still there. Is still there.
3. I think this is the second what-if: I always will think that Cutler unnecessarily picked a fight with rookie coach Josh McDaniels in 2009 that got him traded from Denver to Chicago. Stupid move by Cutler—even in retrospect, dissing owner Pat Bowlen at the time, and even though McDaniels made some huge mistakes in his ill-fated tenure.
What if Cutler stayed in Denver, and been willing to be coached by McDaniels the way Tom Brady has been willing to be coached by McDaniels? Cutler’s career in Denver could have changed drastically.
4. I think I just realized something about all the ESPN layoffs, thinking about my football Sunday: Do not, I repeat do not, tell me that the “NFL Matchup” show is in danger. That is the one staple to my Sunday morning that I simply cannot do without.
Smart football, put into words the average fan can understand, by really smart and likeable football people—Ron Jaworski, Merril Hoge, Sal Paolantonio. I love that show. It educates without talking down to people. It is a vital part of my football week. ESPN: It must stay. It simply must stay.
5. I think Christian McCaffrey made a few positive impressions at the Panthers’ rookie camp, particularly when he was split wide and ran efficient and fast routes. One impression came after he signed his rookie contract, with $10.7 million in signing bonuses, meaning, if he handles life right, he’ll have some form of security for the rest of his life.
“He celebrated by going to bed,” Joe Person of the Charlotte Observer reported. Said McCaffrey: “I signed, tried to get some sleep to get ready for [practice]. Never get comfortable.”
6. I think Phil Simms has handled his demotion a lot better than I’d handle mine.
7. I think this was the most interesting statement I have heard in the past week. It came from Gil Brandt, when we were talking about the 49ers’ draft, and I asked him about Alabama linebacker Reuben Foster, selected 31st overall by the Niners. “Foster’s the most competitive linebacker I’ve seen come out of the draft since Jack Lambert,” said Brandt, who has studied 58 drafts.
