Let's hop in the time machine for a second and go all the way back to March of 2009. The Jay Cutler situation in Denver had reached a head and there was rampant speculation that the big-armed quarterback could be on his way to Washington.
Obviously those discussions fell through and Cutler ended up being traded to Chicago. We're looking back at that time now because Cutler and the Bears are about to host the Redskins on Sunday. After the jump we'll take a look back at the potential trade and how that might have changed the direction of the franchise moving forward
Mike Mulligan of the Chicago Sun Times has the details on the trade that would have brought Cutler to D.C. if it were completed.
Washington's trade proposal was a complicated three-team deal that would've sent Jason Campbell, Chris Cooley and a fifth-round pick to the Cleveland Browns, Brady Quinn, LaRon Landry and a first-round pick to Denver and Cutler, Tony Scheffler and a third-round pick to Washington. Snyder would then have dumped Jim Zorn as coach and hired Mike Shanahan a year earlier than he did to reunite him with Cutler.
Wow, that's a spicy meat-a-ball. In retrospect it seems like an awful lot to give up for an inconsistent quarterback who had yet to win anything.
Given Cutler's struggles this season it's easy to write the trade off, especially considering how valuable Landry and Cooley have been to the team. But our Redskins blog Hogs Haven isn't so sure that acquiring Cutler would have been such a bad thing if for nothing else than the fact that it would have ended the Vinny Cerrato regime a year early.
My initial reaction is I can't imagine this current Redskins team without Chris Cooley or LaRon Landry. On the flip side, if this deal went through, Shanahan would have been in here last year, which means the entire 2009 season (Jim Zorn, Campbell, Sherm Lewis, swinging gate, 4-12) would have never happened. I'd trade anything in the world for that.
One less year of Cerrato is a world of a difference.
I understand what they are trying to say but that seems like a huge shakeup just to change the regime for one year. It would have been a lot easier to, I don't know, fire him? I know that wasn't a possibility, but if we're playing hypotheticals I might as well just throw that one out there.
This is a commentary on the Cerrato regime more than anything else. Fans would be willing to give up two very valuable players and some picks for a quarterback who might not ever live up to his potential, just to get rid of just one year of Cerrato. I wonder what they'd trade to wipe the whole thing off the books.