Jay Cutler (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, User: Mike Shadle)

You try that [screaming] with a pineapple down your windpipe. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Ep. 4: Owl Stretching Time, “Self Defence”

I’m no big Jay Cutler fan.  He throws off of his back foot; he holds on to the ball too long and too often when the defense is about to smash his face into the turf; he doesn’t tuck the fucking ball when he rushes.

But Cutler is a pretty good quarterback.  In fact, about twenty teams in this league don’t have a quarterback of his caliber, and what Jay did this season is impressive in its own right because he did it all with a pineapple down his windpipe.  The guy was sacked 52 times and played 15 regular season games, missing only one due to a concussion.  He was absolutely leveled a number of times and got back up, took the next snap, and played football.  One need only recall that disastrous game against the New York Giants that saw Cutler sacked nine times to know that he’s not a quarterback who lies down on the job.

What follows is a back-of-the-envelope comparison of statistics.  There are other relevant numbers you could bring up; and there is certainly a discussion to be had if the numbers I’ve come up with really mean anything at all, but just for fun, let’s take a look at how the quarterbacks who have been sacked at least fifty times in a season have fared over the last ten years:

This is sorted by QB Rating—highest to lowest—and you’ll see that Cutler’s season ranks third.  Sure, he’s actually at the high end of average on this list, but he ties Aaron Rodgers for having led his team to the best record: 11-5.  Even if we take away the Bears’ questionable wins against the Lions and the Packers, Cutler would fall into a tie for second with Ben Roethlisberger at 9-7.

(On a side note, look at David Carr’s rookie season in 2002 with the Houston Texans.  Seventy-six sacks.  What a welcome to the NFL.)

Cutler didn’t play well in the NFC Championship; but he had a good season, all things considered, and he didn’t deserve the backlash he received from fellow players and fans, especially considering that we now know he suffered a sprained MCL.  Lovie Smith and the Bears’ medical staff made the decision to pull him, and it was the right one.  Cutler is no less of a football player because of it.

And he’s certainly not a quitter.

I’m not one of those people that plays golf often as I find it is best enjoyed sparingly and only after adhering to a months-long regimen of intense meditation, masturbation, and dieting.  Anything less might allow for my violent competitiveness to creep in and ruin the day for everyone.  Indeed.  No one who competes against me in anything, be it darts, pool, basketball, or jacks (etc.) will end up enjoying himself very much.  If I perform well, I normally win by a large enough margin to make the game seem pointless, and if I am losing, I will fall into petulance and throw a conniption fit with little regard for the embarrassment caused by my actions. It’s a bad scene and one from which I recommend abstinence at all costs.  There is nothing like seeing a grown, half-bearded man in a straw hat and brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt stomping on the green and digging large ruts into the fairway with his 9-iron as happened today.  By the sixth hole (of nine) I was putting with a severely bent Diamondback putter that became so when I took aim at my golf bag with an old 9-wood and made what essentially proved to be my only solid contact of the day.

That was my Father’s Day gift to my dad.  How proud he must be of his 25-year-old son.

For now, it might be feasible to blame last night’s thunderstorms for flooding the course and forcing me to decide against wearing my red canvas Converse One-Stars.  Whereas the bane of my golf swing since time immemorial has been a more or less consistent and wicked slice, I kept hitting the ball off the heal of my club and putting a nasty draw on it.  Somehow, my monster drives were stolen and replaced with low-flying line drives that seemed almost magnetically attracted to the tree lines.

But it does seem shortsighted to bitch and moan about a golf game, let alone my first of the year, no matter how badly it went awry.

After all, Tehran continues to reel in the turmoil of Ahmadinejad v. Mousavi.  I have no doubt the election was fixed, but without international press allowed into Iran to report on the situation, it is difficult to know exactly what is what.  Mousavi was the former prime minister of Iran and has ties to Khomeini that are badly covered or glossed over in the Western press, facts that don’t require access to the country and should be well-publicized.  In perusing the blogosphere, I saw one comment on Anonymous Iran that went like this: “Agreed, Mousavi was more of an excuse than anything. And the spark led to a fire that is by no means about him anymore.”  So it sounds to me like Mousavi is not the reformist/outsider he was cracked up to be, and it stands to reason the the comment from Anonymous Iran might not be far from the truth.

Long before the election and the subsequent Iranian protests, the conventional wisdom stated that most Iranians did not possess the combative, ultra-conservative bent of the clinically insane Ahmadinejad.  The kids listen to Western music, wear Western clothes, and more or less, adhere to Western ideals while behind closed doors.  Sure, the view from the street was much different, but the society operated on a society-wide version of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.  Now, they’ve got a figurehead and a rallying point, and for their sake, I hope they win.  I don’t think they will, but anything that serves to dislodge or destabilize the theocratic element in their government — and, by that, I mean the Ayatollah and his clerics and, while they’re at it, Ahmadinejad — is a movement I’m likely to support.

Don’t get me wrong.  During the Bush years and before, I get the sense that the United States dealt with Iran very crassly and without nuance, and to some extent, Obama might not have sufficiently changed that tune yet.  There has been eerie but understandable silence from the White House on this matter, and any commentary that they have proffered has been tepid and unsure.  Unable to offer blunt support for the protesters, they’ve opted to criticize the Iranian government for little more than the obvious, the deaths of innocent civilians.

Until everything boils over, though, we might as well add a supportive green tint to our Twitter avatars since that’s the level at which political action operates these days.