Coaxing Clutch Out of Kirk Cousins in Week 8 and Beyond
In 2022, clutch became a habit for Kirk Cousins.
Minnesota’s QB1 regularly moved his team down the field, resulting in wins aplenty for his squad. The Vikings sat at 13 wins by the season’s end, and eight of those games featured (fittingly) #8 leading his team down the field to snatch the contest away from the jaws of defeat.
Move ahead to 2023 and the Vikings are dealing with a different scenario.
After seven weeks, the team has already matched their loss total from the previous year. At least one of the reasons why is that Cousins doesn’t yet have a game-winning drive. For the most part, he has had an excellent season, but the switch will need to get flipped in the coming weeks so that he can pull off an unlikely win or two.
Kirk Cousins and The Art of Clutch
At times, the game-winning drives statistic can be fairly misleading. After all, it’s the teams that consistently build and maintain leads that don’t give their QB a shot of leading a comeback.
Combined, Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts — who finished 1st and 2nd in MVP voting last year before leading their teams to the Super Bowl — failed to match Cousins’ game-winning drives total. The issue isn’t with their talent, or lack thereof. Instead, the issue is simply that their excellent teams most often played with the lead, meaning there just weren’t as many chances for a clutch QB to take over.
Cousins, on the other hand, is employed by a team that appears to take great joy in stress-filled games. At 3-4, the Vikings are operating within a season where the offense could have led several clutch come-from-behind victories.
With 5:10 left in the 4th quarter against Tampa Bay, the Vikings went three-and-out. Against Philadelphia, Cousins tossed a late-4th quarter touchdown but the deficit was too large since they were already down by a couple scores. The Chargers defeat ended in an interception on a pass intended for T.J. Hockenson while the Kansas City loss ended with Cousins getting sacked.
A quick recap: The Vikings’ QB1 has gone three and out, had a deficit that was too large to overcome, threw an interception, and got sacked. The basic summary comes nowhere close to capturing the true complexity of the finishing moments of a football game. Hopefully, though, there is a bit of a sense of some of the things that went wrong in the final moments.
Maybe the most discouraging part of the failed comeback attempts is that Cousins did an excellent job at the end of the game against the Chargers. Yes, the failure to spike the football remains a mystifying, baffling gaffe that made things unnecessarily chaotic at the line of scrimmage. Look at the ball placement from Cousins, though: he slings a fastball into the perfect spot for his TE1 in the endzone.
Not an easy catch, Hockenson still needs to come down with the pigskin. Signing him to a major extension was so that he could make contested catches like that one.
Minnesota will be very happy to build a tremendous lead over Green Bay on Sunday, cruising through a stress-free second half that involves churning out first downs on the ground. Most fans would insist that that approach feels like a far off dream.
Every single game in 2023 has been a one-score game, so a win by multiple scores feels similar to a mirage drifting off into the horizon for the weary traveller who has been following the Vikings through thick and thin.
If the expected happens, then Cousins will get a shot to prove himself clutch yet again before long. The Week 8 game is very likely to be close, so it’s possible that we see an opportunity for #8 to win it at the end.
Playing on the final year of his contract, Kirk Cousins is staring down another opportunity at a tour through free agency. He has been quite consistent in his desire to stick around Minnesota, and his play so far suggests that he’s still getting better.
Pulling off a few more game-winning drives would only help his chances of securing the kind of deal that allows him to retire a Viking.
Editor’s Note: Information from Pro Football Reference helped with this piece.
K. Joudry is the Senior Editor for Vikings Territory and PurplePTSD. He has been covering the Vikings full time since the summer of 2021. He can be found on Twitter and as a co-host for Notes from the North, a humble Vikings podcast.
