John Fox: Jay Cutler will have to beat out Jimmy Clausen for QB job
Despite that face-of-the-franchise contract, there are no guarantees that Jay Cutler will be the Bears' starter in 2015.
By
Ryan Wilson
•
1 min read
After a string of uneven, maddening performances, Jay Cutler, the Bears' franchise quarterback, was benched in Week 16 for Jimmy Clausen. Then-coach Marc Trestman said of his decision, "I think we need a lift at quarterback."
Trestman was fired after the season and replaced by John Fox, who during a four-year stint with the Broncos, endured the highs and lows of competent NFL quarterbacking; Tim Tebow was Fox's starter in Denver for much of the 2011 season, followed by Peyton Manning from 2012-2014.
And now Cutler, who former general manager Phil Emery signed to a seven-year, $126.7 million deal in January 2014, is Fox's problem. And despite that face-of-the-franchise contract, there are no guarantees that Cutler will be the Bears' starter in 2015.
“It’s all an open competition,” Fox said Wednesday at the NFL owners meeting, according to CSNChicago.com. “Obviously you’ve got to start somewhere and my experience in football, really in anything, it’s not where you start a competition; it’s where you finish it.
“But we’ve got to start the race with some kind of lineup. We have not discussed that in depth. We have not presented it to our players yet. I kind of have it in my brain and then they compete.”
That means Cutler will have to beat out Clausen (quick refresher: this guy) for the right to be called the Bears' starting quarterback.
“Logically, if you’re looking at a depth chart two weeks before we can get anything going, I’d say yes, he’s no. 1 on the depth chart,” Fox said of Cutler.
“[But] I’ve had guys who were third on the depth chart that, by the time we started the opener, they were first. So I can’t tell you what’s happening. If I could, I’d be at some racetrack somewhere.”
Which is exactly what happened with the Seahawks and Russell Wilson in the weeks and months leading up to the 2012 season. The rookie third-round pick was well behind Matt Flynn and Tarvaris Jackson heading into training camp and ended up wining the job.
In related news: Marvin Lewis thinks quarterback competitions are silly.
