The Cutler Affair

The conspiracy theorists are out in force on this one and once again they have it wrong.

There is one supreme boss on a football team. That boss has the title of Head Coach (regardless of how Jerry Jones feels). What he says during the course of a football game goes. If the head coach wants to go for it on fourth and inches, it's up to the offensive coordinator to come up with a play that will be successful on fourth and inches. And if the coach wants the fullback to take a direct snap on the play, that's what's going to happen.

I bring all this up because it was Chicago Bears head coach Lovie Smith who told his quarterback Jay Cutler to get off the field at the start of the second half of Sunday's Bears-Green Bay Packers NFC Championship game. That makes the extent of Cutler's injury irrelevant. If the head coach says you're not playing, you're not playing. Same thing happened to Cutler's replacement, Todd Collins, although Smith pulled Collins from the game in favor of Caleb Hanie for entirely different reasons than he pulled Cutler for Collins. But the reasons are just as irrelevant as Cutler's injury. What the coach says goes. So get off it, conspiracy theorists. If you're dumb enough to think Cutler should have "gutted it out" and played the rest of the game, then blame Smith, not Cutler.