THE Jets are a team in need of a quarterback, and Jay Cutler is a quarterback in need of a team. Football can be a complicated game sometimes. There is nothing at all complicated about this.
The Jets need to get him.
“Jay no longer has any desire to play for the Denver Broncos,” Pat Bowlen, the owner of the Broncos, said yesterday, after a fruitless meeting with Cutler’s agent, Bus Cook. “Therefore, we will begin discussions with other teams in an effort to accommodate his request to be traded.”
The Jets need to be one of those teams. The Jets, in truth, need to be in the front of the line.
If Cutler hasn’t exactly covered himself in either glory or maturity during this slap-fight squabble with new Broncos coach Josh McDaniels, he is still a quarterback with three intangibles that are priceless in the NFL: talent, youth and experience.
Right now, the Jets have a lot of youth at the quarterback position, and that’s about it. Whatever experience Kellen Clemens has, much of it has been of the negative variety so far. Whatever talent Clemens or Brett Ratliffe or Erik Ainge may have was mostly hidden by the enormous shadow of Brett Favre.
Cutler is the kind of quarterback you build a team around. He is the kind of quarterback that Mike Shanahan — a man who knows a thing or three about quarterbacks, who made certain to move up in the 2006 draft in order to snare Cutler’s services — handed over the reins to his offense to Cutler soon thereafter.
Rex Ryan is a defensive coach. But he has to know what a franchise quarterback looks like. He has to know he currently doesn’t have one on his roster. And has to know that even if one of the blue chips in the coming draft happens to be available when the Jets pick, there are always questions surrounding a quarterback until he proves he can do it.
Cutler has proven he can do it. His detractors will point to his 17-20 record as a starter, the fact that he presided over a Bronco swoon this past season that was every bit as spectacular as the one the Jets executed, one that cost Shanahan his job.
But Cutler has never played on a team with a defense like the one Ryan is assembling with the Jets. The Broncos’ running back corps was turned into a triage unit this year. And every Jet fan got an eyeful of Cutler’s raw talent on Nov. 30, when Cutler threw for 357 yards and two touchdowns on a wet, windy, awful day at the Meadowlands, pushing the Broncos to a 34-17 win.
Cutler is 25 years old, with three affordable years left on his original six-year deal. He is precisely what the Jets have been searching for: a quarterback with the savvy of Chad Pennington and the arm strength of Vinny Testaverde, a kid on the come around whom they can finally build something real.
Has he acted like a brat at times in this mess? He has. You know what? The Broncos, of all teams, should recognize that behavior, because that’s how they landed John Elway back in the day, after Elway demanded out of Baltimore. Elway was worth it for Denver. Cutler will be ultimately be worth it for the Jets.
They need to make this happen.