Tennessee Titans Shouldn't Pursue Trade with Bears for Jay Cutler

Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler is a quarterback who was once considered good. The Tennessee Titans are a team without a quarterback who has ever been good. In this case, given Cutler's body-language critics, instead of nature abhorring a vacuum, it may just be bored by it. 

On Sunday morning, the day where NFL scoops are contractually obligated to be provided to boost ratings for seven men overlaughing at each other at desks, NFL.com's Ian Rapoport reported that Cutler, who went to college at Vanderbilt, was most interested in a trade to the Titans:

This was immediately seized on by Titans beat reporters as unlikely, and those reporters have tended to be right more often than not. Jim Wyatt of The Tennessean found the rumor preposterous to the point of publicly laughing at it: 

I can see how some would connect the dots for Cutler to join the Titans based on his history there, and he's not a bad fit with head coach Ken Whisenhunt, but it's not a move that makes sense for either side at this time. Cutler's window of time is short: He needs to find the best opportunity to boost his stock back up or risk riding the Matt Schaub train to Irrelevantsville. Tennessee doesn't really have the offensive weapons or game plan to make that happen.

The Titans, meanwhile, have cratered so hard in 2014 that they should be thinking about the long-term. It's hard to say that respectability is out of grasp while playing in the AFC South, but years of bad drafting and quick-fix free-agent signings have left the Titans with a thin roster and little in the way of building blocks. They need to spend the offseason finding more of the latter, not patch up quarterback with, at best, a two-year solution. 

And of course, the big elephant in the room is Cutler's contract, which has been described as so odorous that other teams may receive a draft pick just for taking it on.

Year	Base Salary	Bonuses	Dead Money	Cap Savings on Release
2015	$15.5 million (guaranteed)	$1 million	$19.5 million	($3 million)
2016	$16 million	$1 million	$3 million	$14 million
2017	$12.5 million	$1 million	$2 million	$14 million
2018	$13.5 million	$1 million	$1 million	$16 million
2019	$17.5 million	n/a	n/a	$20 million
2020	$19.2 million	n/a	n/a	$21.7 million

If the Titans actually got a high-round pick for taking it on, sure, Cutler makes more sense in that light. My personal belief is that this report was just released in an attempt to drive the price down. For one thing, the way this contract is structured, cutting Cutler in 2016 would immediately free up $14 million in cap space—it's a bad deal for one year only. 

And c'mon, if a team acquires Cutler via trade, there will almost assuredly be a contract renegotiation to come with it. There's little doubt in my mind that this season won't be used as leverage by the Bears or the acquiring team against Cutler. 

So then the question becomes: Can we trust Cutler to rebound to even his 2013 performance?

Season	DVOA (Rk)	DYAR (Rk)	QBR (Rk)
2014	-0.5% (21)	383 (14)	55.0 (22)
2013	5.5% (13)	392 (18)	55.0 (20)
2012	-13.8% (27)	-81 (28)	51.9 (20)

It's hard to give him complete credit for it given former head coach Lovie Smith's general ineptitude with offense, but Cutler actually posted negative DVOAs in every year of his Bears career before 2013. Is a backslide really that unwarranted? 

I'd like to introduce this chart from Chase Stuart's excellent 2013 post about aging over at Football Perspective into evidence. "The blue line represents the average performance based on the number of quarterbacks actually playing in the NFL that season; the red line shows the aging patterns when you divide by the total number of passers in the group," Stuart writes.

Source: Football Perspective

Cutler will turn 32 before next season, so according to the chart, we've got about one season left of prime Cutler play. Additionally, because that study factors in some of the best quarterbacks to ever play the position, it creates a bit of a selection bias in so much as Cutler hasn't really been close to their equal since he was playing for the Denver Broncos, and only the best quarterbacks are trusted to keep playing into their late 30s.

I have made it abundantly clear that I don't agree with any notion the Titans should consider Zach Mettenberger a future starter. As much as I disagree on Mettenberger's potential, dude, at least Mettenberger is an ethos. Sticking with him in the slim hopes he becomes a future starter is the higher upside play compared to trying to milk the last good years of Cutler's prime. 

I do think there is a price range where Cutler and the Titans become a match, but I don't expect his market to settle quite that low. It's incredibly obvious to me that he's a better fit for teams that are closer to the playoffs and have more to gain from an incremental upgrade—your Buffalos and Houstons, Philadelphias and St. Louises—than he is for a Titans squad that doesn't have much incentive to aim for eight wins beyond saving the jobs of Whisenhunt and general manager Ruston Webster. 

Rivers McCown is the AFC South lead writer for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Three-Cone Drill podcast. His work has also appeared on Football Outsiders and ESPN.com. Follow him on Twitter at @riversmccown.