Filed under: Chicago Bears, NFC North
The storm of criticism directed at Bears quarterback Jay Cutler is dying down, and we're starting to see a more measured analysis of what happened on Sunday, when Cutler left the NFC Championship Game with a knee injury and stood on the sideline during the third and fourth quarter, watching his team lose.What happened was, Cutler suffered an MCL sprain and he, the doctors and the coaches all agreed that he shouldn't go back in. That's it. There's not a whole lot more to the story than that.
Except that the Bears told FOX that Cutler was "questionable" to return, not that he was ruled out of the game. And dozens of NFL players who were watching the game at home heard FOX repeat the "questionable" phrasing, and those players then took to Twitter and bashed Cutler, saying he wasn't tough enough to be a member of their exclusive fraternity.
The reason is that most players view "questionable" as meaning they're in pain, but they could probably tough it out if they had to. They don't view "questionable" as meaning the team doctors and coaches have already said, "You're done for the day."
And that means the Bears screwed up in all this: Once Cutler was ruled out, they should have told FOX that Cutler was ruled out. It was stupid to refer to him as "questionable," because that made it look like he could come back and play and was choosing not to.
During TV broadcasts of NFL games, players who leave with injuries are almost always described as "questionable" to return, mostly because NFL teams are just generally tight-lipped about injuries and don't want to offer any hint about the severity of the injury. But in this particular case, the Bears made Cutler look bad by suggesting he could go, when the doctors had said he couldn't.
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Source: http://nfl.fanhouse.com/2011/01/26/bears-dropped-the-ball-by-calling-jay-cutler-questionable/
Jack Ahearn Mitsuo Akamatsu Takashi Akita Kousuke Akiyoshi Raffaele Alberti
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