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Cutler floats east in disgrace

The long, dull saga of Jay Cutler’s divorce from the Denver Broncos may soon end with the Washington Redskins sending two high draft picks (and possibly Jason Campbell) to Denver. Washington and Cutler deserve each other. While the Bucs or Vikings (or another NFC team) could enter the mix, it’s the Skins who fit the profile of a team willing to repeatedly sell the farm for a big name.

The league has changed so remarkably over the past 20 years. Perhaps this was always true, but today’s NFL is ruled by greed and selfishness. Over and over, the league is tarnished by the growing disloyalty between the players and their teams. Both are at fault, but it is the fans who go hungry, left in tangled shreds along the roadside. How long will this equation work in an economy that spirals violently downward like a burning meteor toward an unkowing earth? Ticket prices rise while the product on the field is increasingly watered down with more teams and more games added to a schedule that already leaves most “stars” injured by season’s end.

I won’t waste any time rooting for Jay Cutler, or the team that picks him up.

In the past six months, we’ve seen one NFL player destroy a human life in a DUI accident, and another SHOOT HIMSELF in a bar. In both cases, the idea of representing one’s team, one’s city–at the very least, something greater than oneself–means nothing.

We are hard-pressed to find an athlete worth caring about.

Jay Cutler inspires no such feelings–he will be a memory soon enough.

He will float off like we all will–vanishing into the night. His achievements: dust.

As Marty Schottenheimer once said to his defense, in huddled silence along the Browns’ sideline in Cleveland Municipal Stadium–in a far better time than this: “There’s a gleam, men… A gleam… A Let’s get the gleam.”

His message is lost today. Lost on Cutler. Lost on the frothing owners. Lost from city to city, in a widening cloud.

Go quietly.