Ryan Tannehill is out (for now), Jay Cutler is back (for now), and now we're left to figure out if this is good or bad news for the 2017 MIami Dolphins.
Obviously, it's bad news to lose your franchise quarterback to a lingering knee issue, especially when Adam Gase's offense seemed to click for Tannehill during the second half of the 2016 season. But the good news is that Cutler, the man who signed to a one-year deal to replace Tannehill while he recovers, played the best football of his career in 2015 when Gase was the offensive coordinator in Chicago. In fact, what Gase did that season played a major part in him getting the Dolphins' head-coaching job a year ago.
Despite making the playoffs last season, a return trip was going to be difficult, mostly because Miami shares the division with New England, the defending Super Bowl champs who remain favorites to win the AFC East, but also because of improved competition across the AFC for wild-card berths. But before we look ahead and try to measure Cutler's impact in Miami, it's instructive to first look back to 2015, when Cutler and Gase first worked together.
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At one point during the 2014 season, a year before Gase arrived in Chicago, Cutler was benched for Jimmy Clausen. (Let that sink in for a moment.) And from 2012-14, Cutler never finished higher than 16th in total QB value, according to Football Outsiders' metrics. In 2015, Gase's first and only year in Chicago, Cutler finished 10th, just behind Kirk Cousins, Philip Rivers and Matthew Stafford. He threw for 3,659 yards with 21 touchdowns, 11 interceptions, a completion percentage of 64.4 and a passer rating of 92.3.
Cutler set career bests in passer rating and career lows in interceptions, and his 244 passing yards per game was No. 2 behind only his 2008 season in Denver. And Cutler's one year with Gase shares a lot of similiarities with what Tannehill and Gase accomplished in their first year together in 2016.
Consider Tannehill's final stat line: 67.1 completion percentage, 230.4 pass yards per game, 19 TDs, 12 INTs, 93.5 passer rating.
So now the two are reunited in South Florida, and the hope is that they can rediscover what they had two years ago. But it's not like Gase will don a wizard's hat, wave a magic wand, and all of Cutler's warts -- the ones that let him languish in free agency as teams opted for other, safer quarterback options -- will disappear. The reality is that for all of Cutler's athleticism and arm strength, his poor mechanics were his downfall right up until the moment he announced he was leaving football to join the broadcast booth.
That was in May, which means that Cutler spent the last three months preparing for his new job talking to people and not training for another NFL season. But at 34, that could be a blessing in disguise. Cutler, who came into the league in 2006, knows his way around training camp, and he's also quite familiar with Gase's offense. In fact, this situation, at least at the outset, is better than the one the Vikings and Sam Bradford found themselves in ahead of the 2016 season.
Minnesota starting quarterback Teddy Bridgewater suffered a season-ending knee surgery late in preseason and the Vikings traded for then-Eagles quarterback Sam Bradford on Sept. 3. Bradford sat out the season opener while familiarizing himself with the offense and promptly went on to play some of the best football of his career.
So back in MIami, it's easy to find the silver linings in the Cutler-Gase reunion, starting with Gase having no preconceived misconceptions about the man he just signed.
"My experience with [Cutler] was very good," Gase said at the owners meetings in March in response to questions about why Cutler remained unsigned at the time. "I don't get all the hatred towards him. I see a guy that worked hard and did everything he could to help his team win. He sacrificed his body. To me, he was an athletic quarterback that can throw the ball. When you got to third down you could call the worst play possible and he would get the conversion. He made a lot of things that we did look really good. I think he has a lot to offer a team."
There are more reasons for optimism. The 2015 Bears had the 10th-best offense in the league, according to Football Outsiders, just ahead of the Packers. Cutler was a big part of that but so too were the players around him, starting with Alshon Jeffery (807 receiving yards, four TDs), Martellus Bennett (439 receiving yards, three TDs) and Matt Forte (898 rushing yards, 4 rushing TDs; 389 receiving yards, three TDs). And while the Dolphins' offense finished 14th last season, they have younger, more athletic playmakers up and down the roster. Jarvis Landry (1,136 yards, 4 TDs), DeVante Parker (744/4) and Kenny Stills (726/9) are all game-changers. And Jay Ajayi, whose 1,272 rushing yards last season included three games of more than 200 yards, ranked seventh among all backs last season.
And perhaps the biggest difference Cutler will see between the '15 Bears and the '17 Dolphins is on the other side of the ball. Miami's defense ranked 19th last season, sandwiched between the Cowboys and Packers. This is nothing to draw attention to until you learn that the 2015 Bears defense ranked 31st. It's hard to win football games when your defense can't stop anybody.
It helps explain why the Bears were 6-10 in '15, the Dolphins improved to 10-6 last season, and why Miami spent much of the offseason solidifying its defense. The team re-signed defensive end Andre Branch and safety Reshad Jones, signed free-agent safeties Nate Allen and T.J. McDonald and inside linebacker Lawrence Timmons, and then used their first three draft picks on defenders: pass rusher Charles Harris in Round 1, linebacker Raekwon McMillan in Round 2, and defensive back Cordrea Tankersley in Round 3.
You see a pattern? And we haven't even mentioned defensive line stalwarts Ndamukong Suh and Cameron Wake.
"I feel like we have one of the best D-lines in football," Timmons told reporters early in his first training camp with the Dolphins. "You've got Wake, you've got Suh -- the best D-tackle ever. Branch has been going crazy. We've got a lot of players and it's going to be fun. We're still trying to develop and get better at the same time."
Again, great news for Cutler.
Still, a lot has to go right for the Dolphins to overcome the loss of Tannehill, who we expected to have a big season. But Cutler and Gase have a great working relationship, and had success together in Chicago. There are also the players around Cutler now in Miami, including a dynamic receiving trio and one of the league's best young runners. Perhaps more importantly, the Dolphins' defense will be markedly better, taking the onus off Cutler, whose mechanics have been known to break down -- with spectacularly disastrous results -- when he tries to do too much.
