Is He Worth It? – Kirk Cousins

I could not craft a series on quarterback contracts without bringing in the king of brokering with NFL teams for more money. That, of course, is Kirk Cousins.

Cousins was given a fully guaranteed, three-year, $84 million contract by a Super-Bowl hungry Minnesota Vikings team fresh off of an NFC title game appearance in 2018. They viewed Cousins as capable of being their franchise quarterback, and as someone who would slot right in with a core of talented receivers and the best defense in the NFL.

That didn’t pan out: over the course of the original three year deal, the Vikings made one run to the divisional round in 2019, and were hovering around .500. It didn’t help PR that Cousins was viewed as a quarterback who almost exclusively beat up on the bad teams, and faltered when he played the good ones.

Yet the Vikings kept giving Cousins short, money-heavy extensions that assisted their salary cap for the immediate year. In 2020, right before the final year of his deal, Cousins was gifted a new extension of $66 million over 20 years, and in 2022, received another 1 year peg of $35 million. Clearly, something was true about Cousins that convinced the Vikings to keep him around for a while, yet held them back from giving him a 4-5 year deal.

Cousins is the most polarizing quarterback in the NFL right now, and potentially ever. He defines the “middle class” of modern day starting quarterbacks, which for some is heavy praise, and for others deserves heavy scorn.

Mostly, Cousins gets praise for being consistently healthy, extremely mechanically consistent and efficient, allowing his playmakers to do their job the way they want to, and putting up extremely gaudy numbers. But one narrative has plagued his career: when massive primetime games occur, he wilts into a crying toddler who just had an accident.

This is a massive issue as far as paying him is concerned: if Cousins is indeed a choke-collar incarnate, then the Vikings have continuously screwed themselves over year after year when they have paid him like a top-tier NFL quarterback.

And yet, this past year, Cousins went 13-4 in the regular season, and won the NFC North on the back of an incredibly loaded offense for Minnesota. That included an 11-0 record in games where the margin was one score.

So what gives? Is Cousins just really unlucky? Is he still a frail glass statue when the better teams play him? The answer, like most things, is very firmly in the middle. Cousins is a very talented thrower of the football, and an efficient passer from the pocket. Yet his ability to improvise against unexpected defensive twists is…not really there.

Here is the new edition of Is He Worth It? And finally, it’s the guy who reset the entire market and made this series possible.

The Good

It is extremely hard for the Vikings to let go of one of the best passing arms in the NFL. While a lot of criticisms get thrown the way of Cousins, this is almost unanimous praise that he gets everywhere you look.

Kirk Cousins is perhaps one of the best pure pocket passers in the modern NFL. He routinely stands tall and delivers his throws and reads with confidence, accuracy, and poise. In particular, Cousins is extremely good at staying intact in the pocket against blitzes and loose pressure.

On a 3rd and 7 early against the Bears in Week 18, Cousins displays his ability to maintain all this while an edge defender comes from his left and blasts him to the ground. Against a cover 3 zone look from the Bears, Cousins has KJ Osborn open deep down the field on a crossing route under only one deep safety.

Cousins does an excellent job of maintaining his mechanics and not overreacting to the knowledge that pressure is coming, and perfectly places the throw. The result is 1st and goal for the Vikings on what could have easily been a sack for a less sturdy quarterback.

This same poise allows Cousins to take advantage of blitzes for some extremely punishing plays against opposing defenses. A 3rd and 6 play against the Bears, with about 12 minutes left in the 1st half, sees Cousins face 6 man pressure against man coverage.

Cousins immediately does the math with how the blitz forms, and knows that the blitzing defender is leaving Adam Thielen one on one with the deep safety. As a result, KJ Osborn, who is being pressed well on the outside by a corner, has all kinds of room to get the 1st down. So, rather than get loose and panic against the extra pass rushers, Cousins calmly plants the ball right to KJ Osborn on a slant route.

So Cousins doesn’t mess up against the pass rush. Great. But the secret sauce to his passing ability is how very quick and prepared he is with his decision making on every individual snap he encounters.

Midway through the 1st quarter, the Vikings have 2nd and 7, and opt for an I formation fake into a deep passing concept where they try to bait the Bears defense into allowing 2 vertical routes wide open downfield. The Bears end up seeing this, and send their linebackers deep into pass coverage, resulting in a split-safety 7 man zone all around the two deep routes.

Cousins, however, immediately has a backup plan for this scenario: his fullback. What is otherwise a routine dump-off to CJ Ham running a quick out, is instead a very nice chunk 1st down on a play where all of the first options get taken up.

Kirk Cousins gets heat from some circles for being a slow quarterback to make decisions, and checking down out of indecision. Actually, the opposite is true. Cousins is an extremely quick quarterback to mentally process coverage, and will consistently find the best option to get the ball to, even when he has to get bludgeoned or can’t really see the throw due to pressure.

Where Cousins falters

Here is where Cousins tends to struggle against better teams: For all of the good presnap evaluation and decision making that Kirk Cousins shows on film, he also has a tendency to not bail out of plays that go wrong. At times, he even actively makes adverse situations worse with some of his inerrant throws, and this often occurs when the decision on who to throw to is not as clear.

The game against the Packers at Lambeau, resplendent with the extremely intimidating crowd noise that the venue is known for, is filled with all kinds of miscues from Cousins as the Packers defense clamps down on almost every aspect of what the Vikings want from their offensive gameplan. The easiest way to look at this, of course, is Quarterback-induced turnovers.

Down 3-17, with 6 minutes left in the game, Cousins faces 1st and 10. The Vikings call a wide empty spread play out of shotgun, and the Packers show a 2 safety zone shell coverage, only bringing four pass rushers.

One edge gets around to Cousins in the pocket, and another gets in his face and blocks his vision. Meanwhile, Jefferson falls on his route, an in-cut that is designed to either break open underneath a safety, or bust Thielen wide open on a go route.

Not only do three defenders make their way around him, Jefferson trips on his route. This isn’t enough to stop Cousins from not taking the pressure in the pocket into account, and he flings the ball up for Jefferson, a pass which is immediately intercepted.

Another play in the second half shows Cousins’s Vikings down 3-27, with 7:06 to go in the 3rd quarter. The Vikings operate another empty gun formation, with 5 wide, against, again, a 2 safety zone shell coverage with 4 pass rushers.

Cousins seems so fixated on the play being designed for Adam Thielen to come underneath a safety in a window that he waits until Thielen has stopped his route, staring him down in the process. After doing this while ignoring an open crossing route from TJ Hockensen, and a checkdown hitch route from Dalvin Cook, Cousins is stripped of the ball.

To make matters worse, Cousins does the exact same thing on the very next drive; he stares down Adam Thielen, convinced that coverage will allow him to come open on a post route down the middle of the field.

Cousins, however, gets one very crucial thing wrong. He is throwing to Thielen one on one with a corner trailing him, meaning that the one deep safety will attempt to bite on the anticipation-based deep throw. This throw will come open if the safety, for some reason, feels the need to go toward something to the other side of the field.

This does not happen, and Cousins forces the throw anyway, leading to an already bleak Vikings loss becoming even more of a blowout.

What all of this indicates is that Kirk Cousins is not a strong quarterback at getting off of his first calculation of what the defense is allowing him to do. There are too many times for comfort where Kirk Cousins is so beholden to operating the play as designed, that he forces the issue-leading to an already tricky situation turning into a disastrous turnover.

Final evaluation

Player Grade: B

Contract Grade: C

To some extent, the contract that Kirk Cousins got when he signed with the Vikings was poorly timed. The team was coming off of a deep playoff run in 2017 and, despite the unsustainability of maintaining a defense-led roster, gambled that Cousins was the last little thing that the team would need to finish the job and win it all in 2018.

That didn’t happen under Zimmer, who was eventually fired as the defense began a slow, painful regression right as Cousins was brought on. The best that Cousins has performed in purple was last year, when the defense was abominable.

Cousins himself is a firm upper-middle of the pack quarterback. He excels at doing everything you want a quarterback to do in the NFL-he quickly reads defenses, he has an extremely accurate arm, and he knows how to handle pressure coming in his face while making throws.

Yet the tighter throws, and the moments where he can’t quite predict what will happen, seem harder for him. As a result, you get the substantially worse record against better teams, currently 14-43 in his career. While this most recent season didn’t see him panic mentally against every winning team, it did see him struggle more against the better defenses in the league-which, naturally, are harder and less predictable to play against.

Hopefully, his recent track record of success continues, and the contract grade goes up. While Cousins is a solid player, the amount the Vikings continue to pay him is untenable if you want to build the kind of roster he needs to win a Super Bowl.