Cutler excited about working with new offensive coordinator
LAKE FOREST, Ill. – Quarterback Jay Cutler enjoyed meeting with Mike Martz last Saturday in Nashville and is eager to begin working with the new Bears offensive coordinator.
Cutler and Martz talked football in a Vanderbilt classroom and went out for dinner together. On Monday, the veteran NFL coach was hired to run the Bears offense in place of the fired Ron Turner.
“I felt very comfortable with him,” Cutler said. “The results of his offense speak for themselves. He had a lot of success in St. Louis and his offenses made improvements each year in Detroit and San Francisco. I haven’t run his system, but I am familiar with it. I’m anxious to start digesting the playbook and getting back on the field.”
Quarterback Jay Cutler passed for 3,666 yards with 27 TDs and 26 interceptions in his first season with the Bears in 2009.
Martz always has had high expectations for the quarterbacks he’s worked with and doesn’t think that Cutler will have a problem with the demands placed on him.
“The connection that we had on really I guess more less an intellectual level was so much fun for me,” Martz said. “His expectations for himself are extremely high, and that was one of the great things about meeting with him. This guy’s all about winning now. He’s frustrated he’s not at an elite level and he can’t contribute to helping that football team win.
“There are so many things that came out of [the meeting] about Jay that were exciting for me just on who he is, and to kind of discuss what he’s about was very encouraging.”
Martz spoke to Cutler about comments the coach had made on NFL Network about the quarterback following the Bears’ Week 1 loss to the Packers. At the time, Martz criticized Cutler’s demeanor in his post-game press conference after he had thrown a career-high four interceptions in a 21-15 loss.
“He just doesn’t get it,” Martz said at the time. "He doesn’t understand that he represents a great head coach and the rest of those players on that team.”
“I addressed that immediately with Jay,” Martz said. “The thing I told Jay—and I said this a few days after that show—the thing I felt bad when I watched that was I felt like I knew who Jay was. I met with him when he was coming out in the draft [in the 2006] for quite some time up in Detroit.
“I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of who he was and the integrity and the dignity that he has and how classy a guy he is, and how he kind of misrepresented himself with that and really that was totally out of frustration from that game.
“He’s going to be one of the elite players in this league for a long time and those are things that he’s just going to have to deal with. That was a very difficult situation for him, very difficult, but a great experience for him to go through it and know now you’ve just got to kind of take that deep breath before you go in there [to a press conference].
“As a former head coach you go through those things and collect yourself a little bit and then go in there. It just did not I didn’t think demonstrate who he really was in that, and those are all learning experiences for all of us.”
