The Vikings Are Entering Life Without Kirk Cousins: Now What?
I attended a Vikings Watch Party at a friend’s house last weekend, and Kirk Haters were present. There were tons of awesome food, and tons of snarky comments about Kirk Cousins. The comments, of course, were before Cousins tore his Achilles Tendon.
It should be noted that these comments did not come before Cousins had risen to the top of the charts where NFL league-leaders were concerned. #1 in touchdowns thrown. #2 in total yards through the air. #3 in NFL Quarterback Rating and Pro-Football Register’s “Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt”, a metric that adds weight for touchdowns thrown and subtracts weight for sacks taken and interceptions thrown. #5 in completion percentage.
Further, in his sixth season with Minnesota, he has joined all-time Viking greats Fran Tarkenton and Tommy Kramer atop of the franchise’s leaderboard in virtually all passing statistics. By any and all metrics, this was a quality Quarterback, and absolutely a member of the Top Ten Quarterbacks club in 2023.
And still, the grumbling continued. The Watch Party, I realized, was a perfect microcosm of Viking nation as a whole.
There were voices heartily supporting Kirk; there were others declaring, “I don’t love Kirk or anything, but I think he’s doing a pretty good job.” Then there were the grumblers. “You’re taking too long, Kirk!” they wailed. “He’s just not a leader”, they surmised. These are some of the prime beefs that members of the American Association of Kirk Haters (AAKH) have routinely introduced into conversations at barbecues, around office coolers, on talk radio stations, and across the Internet.
Kirk Objection: Taking Too Long To Throw
In 2023, Kirk, along with his offensive line, has pulverized the grumbling about taking too long to throw. This is a two-part issue—number one, the numbers say he’s doing just fine, as he was ranked #6 in percentage of sacks taken against dropbacks. Not a whole lot of improvement left, unless your only motivation for this criticism is because you, yourself, can’t stand the heat while watching our quarterback narrowly avert disaster before finding an open receiver or throwing the ball away.
Number two is a problem of perception. The vast majority of all members of the AAKH have never stood in the pocket during an NFL game, after getting in his or her pre-snap reads, taking a 5- or 7-step drop (depending on what the situation calls for), scanned the field for a primary, then secondary, then ancillary receiver from among 3-5 different routes across the field while simultaneously feeling the pressure from four or more massively large human beings who get paid large sums of money specifically to maul the QB as often as possible.
The fact of the matter is, all of the best quarterbacks take “too long”. They can feel things their middle-of-the-pack peers cannot; they use some sort of Jedi Mind Trick to sense until the last quarter-second how much time they have to check down or wait an extra beat for a receiver to come open, and the very thing that most casual fans find to be an annoying flaw can in fact generate greater success on the field.
Kirk isn’t taking too long, and he’s not panicking. We’re the ones panicking because we can’t handle the pressure, and we’re just watching on TV.
After the Achilles, Even Kirk Haters Were Panicking
Speaking of panicking, admit it: even those of you who are card-carrying member of AAKH were panicking the moment news broke that Kirk Cousins had possibly (later downgraded to “definitely”) torn his Achilles.
Just when we had finally come back from 0-3 and 1-4 to claim a .500 record with a soft schedule ahead? This was going to be one of those we-never-saw-it-coming amazing seasons that you never expect and almost never even dare to hope for, and then all of us a sudden, BANG! Down goes Cousins. Now what?
We were all having a “holy crap now what” moment. We had watched Jaren Hall mop up after Kirk’s Achilles blew. We all knew how raw the kid is, and we thought about next week.
There’s no way he’s going to be standing back in the pocket for an entire NFL game, cool as a cucumber, one beat “too long” and yet magically just right, before zinging touchdown passes to Jordan Addison, right? Holy crap, indeed.
And isn’t this what the AAKH lobby was wishing for all along? In recent years I had actual conversations with people who legitimately thought the Vikings had one, and only one, problem and his name was Kirk Cousins. Get rid of Cousins and all would be right with the world.
Even my friend Jon’s 92-year-old mom has been convinced that our only problem was a Cousins problem. There’s been absolutely no convincing her that Kirk is a nice man with nice manners. She wants him gone, and makes no apologies for it. I’m starting to wonder if maybe she actually has stood in the pocket and felt the pressure. Or, that 40 years as a high school teacher was close enough.
Anyway, the assumption among the AAKH faithful was that we simply purge Cousins from our sight and memory, and in his place we would…what? I don’t know, go out to the Top-Five Quarterback tree in the yard and just pick one? Magically—and intentionally, and knowingly—divine who the next Tom Brady, drafted in the sixth round at number 199 overall, is going to be? Get the Chiefs to shrug their shoulders and trade us Patrick Mahomes?
With the Achilles injury to Cousins, the AAKH crew is now getting what they’ve been waiting six years for: to be rid of Kirk. And now we’re all going to find out what that’s like. No Quarterback Trees, no magic draft seeds. Fortunately, we at least got the Cardinals to shrug their shoulders and trade us Josh Dobbs, who, just to be clear, is most certainly NOT Patrick Mahomes.
We now have four backup quarterbacks at our disposal, and for the next nine games, we’ll see how the Vikings brain trust mix and match Dobbs and Hall and maybe Nick Mullens and Sean Mannion.
It remains to bee seen if we can somehow maintain a winning record and/or a spot in the playoffs. This Sunday, we’ll be playing a comparable team to ours in the Atlanta Falcons, and they, too, will be starting a backup quarterback in Taylor Heinicke in place of starter Desmond Ridder. So, maybe we can start on even ground and go from there.
Kirk Objection: Leadership
In the hours following the injury, the press interviewed many members of the Vikings, and it slowly became apparent another one of the AAKH platforms, that Kirk Cousins was not a leader, had been nothing but fake news.
If you were paying attention during the press conferences, the post-game interview, it was so readily apparent that they were hurting about losing a leader who they care for and have the utmost respect.
From man after man, the quotes consistently lamented the loss of not just their quarterback, but their leader. “It’s going to be tough to lose a leader like that,” were the first words out of Jordan Addison’s mouth. Byron Murphy: “first of all, Kirk, best quarterback I’ve played with, leadership, all that…”; from Coach Kevin O’Connell: “Every single player in our locker room is thinking about our leader, our guy right now.”
Dobbs, Hall, and company are going to be a hard-pressed to fill the leadership void. Can they throw the ball downfield successfully? Can they give Justin Jefferson a reason to come back from injury? Can they run the plays without major mistakes? Can they help the rapidly-jelling nucleus of this team continue to grow, and can they deliver wins during an important middle section of the schedule that seemed, until late last Sunday, ripe for ripping off a succession of W’s? And if they do all of that, can they navigate us through a tough December, and potentially an even tougher route through the playoffs?
Those are an awful lot of questions. Nobody will really know the answers until they play the games. All I know is, if Kirk Cousins were still under center, we wouldn’t have had to ask six of those seven questions. We would have known unequivocally, the answer was, “yes, Kirk can do that”. That last one about navigating a tough route through the playoffs? We may never know for sure.
