Cutler should take charge of Bears offense

The Bears are 1-0 in 2012, according to head coach Lovie Smith.

Using such logic the Bears also were 0-4 against Green Bay in 2011.

And, yet, despite the Packers as the focus of wandering lectures and pandering words, Smith will nevertheless keep his position and take all 3 of his postseason victories with him into his ninth season at the helm in 2012.

If he wants to win another playoff game and keep his job, the first thing he ought to do is put Jay Cutler in charge of the offense.

No, not in totality, but for all intents and purposes.

Next year will mark Cutler's sixth offensive coordinator in eight years — dating to Vanderbilt — not to mention a host of QB coaches.

What he doesn't need now is yet another new scheme and further restrictions.

When Cutler took over the offense from Mike Martz in 2011 the result was 5 straight victories. The Bears handed off more, the drops were shorter, the routes quicker, he got out of the pocket more frequently, and some he just made up as he went along — usually because he was scrambling for his life.

Cutler knows what to do now after six years in the NFL, and if the Bears were smart they would allow him to call his own plays.

Seriously, let him play a role in designing the offense and let him call his own plays.

Bring in his old friend Jeremy Bates or put Mike Tice in the role as coordinator, but don't make huge changes.

Smith just wasted two years of Cutler's career under Martz, and it would be shameful to discard another season having the QB get used to another new scheme.

Simplify the Martz offense without changing all the terminology for a quiet transition, but once the coaches have broken down the tape and come up with a game plan, let Cutler adjust on the field to what he sees that day, calling plays and audibles as he sees fit.

Make the routes flexible — they were not with Martz — and allow Cutler to use his players' strengths rather than trying again to shoehorn players into the system's strengths.

At this point, having him run the outfit can't be any worse than the last few years, when Cutler — who's not the easiest guy to get along with — clashed with all of his coordinators and QB coaches.

The Bears have invested so much in Cutler that one would suppose they'd want to make this as good a situation for him as possible, and that means keeping him out of the hospital, giving him people he wants to work with and plays he wants to run.

Furthermore, it's time for Smith to understand that in order to beat the Packers the Bears are going to have to outscore them. So rather than spend in free agency and the draft on the players Smith wants on defense, the Bears ought to load up on offense and get Cutler the weapons and protection he needs to take his game to the next level.

The NFL isn't heading that way. It's already there. The sooner the Bears come to terms with that, the sooner they will succeed.

Think offense, find offense, and let Cutler run the offense.

Some years back I asked a commercial airline pilot if he ever worried about his safety when getting into the cockpit.

He said, essentially, that he had complete faith in his mechanics, total confidence in his airline's equipment and an absolute belief in his own ability. Therefore, he never had any fear going to work and was certain of the outcome.

This is what Cutler needs stepping onto a football field. He needs to have complete faith in his coaches, total confidence in his offensive line and receivers and an absolute belief in his own ability.

If the Bears give him that, he will no longer fear going to work and the Bears can be fairly certain of the outcome.

To this point, the Bears have not given Cutler all he needs and so they've not discovered all he can be.

To this day, we can't be sure of Cutler's ceiling, but he displayed for a few games this season a talent that appeared to be nearly as good as the best in football.

Granted, it was a small sample size, but he also was doing it with inferior talent around him.

The franchise is banking on Cutler being great, and the fastest way to cash in is by surrounding him with NFL-caliber players and giving him a game plan he can respect and execute.

The clock is running and the Bears already have given away three years of Cutler's career. There's no time for an entirely new system again.

So if the Bears are smart they'll get out of the way and just let him play.

brozner@dailyherald.com

#376;Hear Barry Rozner on WSCR 670-AM and follow him @BarryRozner on Twitter.