For his career, Jay Cutler is 68-71, which would put him just a hair below .500. He’s also 1-1 in the playoffs.

For his career, Jay Cutler has averaged 5.88 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, while the league average over that span has been 5.85 ANY/A, putting him just a hair above average.

Cutler wasn’t drafted to be league average, and he’s been a polarizing player for much of his career. He hasn’t quite fulfilled the high potential he had as a prospect, but he’s also been a bit better than the critics suggest, too. He’s not great, he’s not bad, he’s… average.

One thing that’s kind of interesting: his record hasn’t really correlated with his passing efficiency numbers. The correlation coefficient between his Relative ANY/A — that is, his ANY/A minus league average — and his winning percentage is just 0.21.

In the below, I’ve plotted Cutler’s Relative ANY/A in blue against the left Y-Axis, and his team’s winning percentage in red against the right Y-Axis. As you can see, there’s not a big relationship there, with 2012 (great record, bad stats) and 2015 (strong stats, bad record) sticking out as clear outliers:



But take a look at the same chart, but with his team’s defense’s DVOA in blue instead, also plotted against the left Y-Axis but in reverse order (since for defensive DVOA, negative is better). The correlation coefficient here is -0.66, so a much stronger relationship (again, negative is better for defensive DVOA).

That just further reinforces the point that Cutler’s pretty average. Which is valuable, of course, because there aren’t many starting quarterbacks in the NFL that can make that claim. With a strong defense, he’ll probably be good enough to get his team to the playoffs. With a bad one, he probably won’t be good enough to make that team competitive. Excluding 2006, when he started just 5 games, Cutler’s had a top-20 defense just three times in his career, and in all of those seasons, his defense was actually top-5. He made the playoffs in two of those three years, with the outlier year coming when Cutler went 7-3 but the Bears went 1-5 with his backups.