The Cutler/Orton/Tebow Trade...Revisited

So.....Now that Kyle Orton has been sacked by the Broncos and Jay Cutler is out for the season for the Bears, I thought it would be nice to look back upon the initial trade that brought Orton to Denver, Cutler to Chicago, and was partially responsible for bringing Tim Tebow to Denver. In this article I will attempt to clarify who ultimately wound up being involved in this trade, and then I will attempt to use a metrics-based approach to do a light evaluation of how this trade has worked out so far. The source information for this article comes from a brilliant article done by Denver Post writer Mike Klis, and from the data and statistical analyses done by the hard working folks over at Pro-Football Reference.com.


Here is a diagram outlining how the trades started out and who ultimately was brought to the Broncos/Bears either wholly or in part, by this trade.

To summarize the personnel involved in the trade, the Broncos traded Jay Cutler and the draft pick that ultimately wound up being Johnny Knox to the Bears. In exchange, the Broncos got Orton and draft picks that ultimately wound up becoming Robert Ayers, Demaryius Thomas, Eric Decker, 1/2 of Richard Quinn, and 1/3 of Tim Tebow. Yes, part of this trade went toward the draft pick that was Tebow, so it wouldn't be too far off base to say that the Cutler trade was partially responsible for Tebow coming to Denver.

While many have criticized Josh McDaniels' actual draft selections, he seems to have been pretty good at trading picks for more picks and moving around the draft board. In this case he took 2 - 1st Round Picks and a 3rd Round Pick and wound up with 2 - 1st Round Picks, a 3rd round Pick, 1/2 of a 2nd Round Pick and 1/3 of a 1st Round Pick.

So how good or bad was this trade??

It is awfully hard to use a fact-based approach to evaluate a trade of this kind, but I have taken a stab at rating it "so far" while keeping in mind that most people in this trade are still very young. I have utilized a metric devised by the folks over at Pro-Football Reference.com. The metric is called Approximate Value and in its simplest terms is an attempt to measure the value of players across positions and sides of the ball. A better/fuller explanation of this metric can be found at the Pro-Football Reference Blog.

Now don't take the rest of this post too serious as it is more for fun than anything else, but I have taken the AV described above and attempted to evaluate the trade with the AV metric. I have probably misused it by summing the AV's to try to get to an overall AV trade value. Here is what I found:

AV Analysis	2009	2010
Cutler	11	12
Knox	6	9
Bears Total	17	21
Orton	11	11
Ayers	3	4
Thomas	0	2
Decker	0	1
1/2 of Quinn	0.5	1
1/3 of Tebow	0	1
Denver Total	14.5	20

Through the 2009 and 2010 seasons, the Bears hold a slight advantage when the AV's are totaled. While certainly too early to really tell if this was a fantastic trade for either team, it will be fun in the future to watch these players and see how this trade, involving so many players, turns out...Enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving to all...Cheers...

Bo