Jay Cutler was lambasted in the NFC Championship game after leaving with a knee injury, but the guy took a beating last year that most quarterbacks don’t endure at any point in their careers. Playing behind a porous offensive line, in Mike Martz system that puts it on the quarterback to get the ball out, Cutler was sacked 52 times, 12 more than any other quarterback (Joe Flacco, 40).

Not all of those sacks are on the line, the quarterback certainly has to recognize where the pressure is coming from and get rid of the ball. In the Giants game where Cutler was knocked out at half time after taking 9 sacks, a fair amount of those were on him. Still, let’s not sugar coat it. The Bears line puts pressure on the quarterback to have to make those decisions quickly. Whether they’ve done enough to upgrade the unit will factor in how likely Cutler is to get through 2011.

The main upgrade is the drafting of Gabe Carimi to play right tackle, but he was more touted as a run blocker ideal for the right side. The other change is not retaining veteran Olin Kreutz, who signed with New Orleans. It does not so far in the preseason look like a unit ready to take a big leap forward.

Since I couldn’t think of a way to look at how the Kristin Cavallari breakup would affect him, I settled for the next best thing. To see the effect of the sacks on Cutler, I looked at other QB’s who pretty up a decent yards per attempt greater than 7.0, in a season in which they took 50 or more sacks. Since 1978, 21 Quarterbacks returned as the starter the next season after meeting those benchmarks (Well, 16, but Bledsoe, Brunell, Kitna, O’Brien and Simms did it twice).

The next year, they averaged 12.6 games played, so the propensity to get hit did result in more games missed than the average starting quarterback with a solid yards per attempt. The sack rates improved slightly, from 10.2% to 9.1%, though the group was still below the league average for taking sacks. The yards per attempt for the group declined from 7.54 to 7.15 the following season. The biggest decliners were Hugh Millen in 1992 (7.5 to 5.9), Drew Bledsoe in 2000 (7.4 to 6.2) and 2003 (7.1 to 6.1), Jon Kitna in 2008 (7.3 to 6.3), and Ron Jaworski in 1984 (7.4 to 6.4).

Of course, we want to compare that to something, so a look at the guys with high yards per attempt but the best sack rates (a lot of Marino, Manning and Fouts) shows that the average games played was 15.3 the next year. The average YPA drop was just a little smaller, even though there was farther to decline because of better performances, from 7.77 to 7.44. If we look at just the guys from each group who averaged between 7.0 to 7.99 YPA the previous year, the high sack guys declined by 0.38 yards per attempt, versus 0.20 for the low sack guys.

I’m not a fan of the Bears prospects in 2011. They relied on a pretty good defense in 2010, something which is less stable, and that defense is built on three players now over 30, Julius Peppers, Brian Urlacher, and Lance Briggs. If any of those guys miss significant time, like Urlacher did two years ago, I can see this unit taking several steps back.

On offense, the major issue is the offensive line. They also addressed their lack of playmakers on offense by trading away Greg Olsen (since Martz didn’t utilize him anyway) and adding two Dallas castoffs, Roy Williams and Marion Barber III, hardly inspiring the fanbase that they had upgraded the position. The Bears ranked 30th in offensive yards, but scored points because the defense put them in good positions, and because of Devin Hester’s returns, including 3 for scores.

Lots of reasons to expect regression this year, including that they scored more points than the yardage profile suggests, they were among the leaders in turnovers forced and special teams touchdowns, plus that point differential shows them to be closer to a 9.5 win team who won close games (7-3 in single score games). It’s not every year that a team can reach the conference championship by never having to beat an average team in the playoffs. I’m not sure Jay Cutler makes it through this year without missing 5 or more games, and unless they show significant improvement on the offensive line from what we expect, 6-7 wins seems more likely than a return showing to a NFC Championship game witnessed by Maurice Jones-Drew and millions of others.

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[photo via Getty]