Comparing Mac Jones to Kirk Cousins isn't fair to either QB
You've heard Cousins's name a lot during draft season but analysts using it are missing the mark
By Matthew Coller
You ever wonder who the first person to coin a phrase was?
For example: Who was the person that came up with, “the grass isn’t always greener on the other side?” Nobody knows or cares, we all just decided that metaphor worked and rolled with it.
That’s how draft season has gone with comparisons between Mac Jones and Kirk Cousins.
Who was the first person to come up with Jones/Cousins comparisons? It would be impossible to track down at this point since everyone has seemed to agree that it was a perfect fit and it’s been endlessly used.
Like “the grass isn’t always greener,” there’s some truth to the accepted comparison. Neither Jones or Cousins are mobile or rocket-armed. You won’t see either one running like Michael Vick or launching the ball 80 yards in the air like Jeff George. It seems like every not-fast QB over the last few years has gotten the Cousins comp.
But there’s a few issues with it, starting with their backgrounds.
Cousins was a three-year starter at Michigan State whose supporting cast and production could be properly described as “meh.” His top two receivers during his senior year were BJ Cunningham and Keshawn Martin. Cousins finished his stint with the Spartans with an unspectacular 64.1% completion percentage, 66 touchdowns and 30 interceptions.
Jones is a one-year starter who had an insanely good supporting cast that featured two potential top-10 draft pick receivers. He won the national championship, completed 74.3% of his passes, threw for 56 touchdowns and seven picks over his 556 attempts as Bama’s starter.
Absolutely no one talked about Cousins as a top pick in the 2012 draft. ESPN’s draft profile ranked him as the seventh best QB prospect and projected him as an “excellent backup” in the NFL.
Whether you believe the reports Jones could go No. 3 overall or not, he’s clearly considered a far superior prospect than Cousins was based on first-round buzz alone. Prior to the 49ers rumors, Vegas still set the over-under on where he’d be picked at No. 19 overall. Our friend at Yahoo! Sports Eric Edholm compared Jones to Kurt Warner. It’s hard to find 2012 draft comps but you can pretty safely say nobody had Cousins being compared to a Hall of Fame QB.
NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein comped Mac Jones to Daniel Jones, another first-round pick. The fact that there’s even top-three debate over Mac Jones makes him much different from when Cousins entered the draft. Cousins was an afterthought in 2012. He’s an outlier as a franchise QB.
Jones is also a better athlete. The website Relative Athletic Scores tabbed Cousins as a 40th percentile athlete at the QB position while Jones scored in the 72nd percentile.
Maybe it would make more sense to pin him with a Jared Goff comp since Goff was the top pick in the draft and a 60th percentile athlete. Of course, that wouldn’t help the narrative that Jones isn’t a good prospect because Goff went to a Super Bowl and led a No. 1 offense. Cousins is the easy target for “overrated” because he hasn’t done those things.
That’s another issue: The Jones-Cousins comp feels like a slam on Cousins. It feels like saying, “if this is what he becomes, that’s bad.” But if Jones turned into Cousins, it would be a big win for whoever drafts him.
Over Cousins’s six years as a starter, he has led a top-five passing offense in EPA (Washington 2016), ranked in the top five by PFF grade once (2019) and in the top 10 two other times, (2016, 2020). Since 2015, there are only five quarterbacks with at least 1,000 pass attempts who have higher quarterback ratings than Cousins. They are Mahomes, Brees, Watson, Wilson and Rodgers. There are only six with higher adjusted yards per pass attempt (same list except Tom Brady included).
What percentage of QBs accomplish those things? Very few. Since Cousins was picked in the 2012 draft, here are the first-round QBs who have at least one season in the top 10 by PFF grade: Ryan Tannehill, Robert Griffin III, Andrew Luck, Patrick Mahomes, DeShaun Watson, Carson Wentz, Baker Mayfield, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen.
That’s nine out of 28 quarterbacks. Certainly Kyler Murray, Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert have shown the potential to end up on that list.
So if Jones ends up having top-10 graded seasons, he’d be in the minority of NFL QBs drafted in the first round.
Can you question whether a player without elite mobility or arm strength can take a team to the Super Bowl? Sure. Can you wonder whether the future of QB play will have room for guys who largely stand in the pocket? Also sure. But even that part of the comp is questionable.
There haven’t been too many articles about how the Browns made a mistake with immobile Baker Mayfield or how Joe Burrow was a bad pick for the Bengals because he didn’t escape the pocket in Year 1. Wouldn’t Jones compare closely to them? They were top prospects with great supporting casts in college and a shortage of Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen’s physical tools. Mayfield was only a 47th percentile athlete.
It seems Cousins is being used because he’s an accurate QB who needs everything to go right around him in terms of weapons and system. How many quarterbacks is that not true?
DeShaun Watson played some of the best football of any QB last year and his team went 4-12 because the Texans were a tire fire. Nick Foles won the Super Bowl with one of the best supporting casts in the last decade. Did Tom Brady pick Tampa Bay because of the uniforms or the supporting cast and coaching? How good was Josh Allen before Stefon Diggs arrived?
This is another key area where the comparison misses. Building that stacked supporting cast is realistic considering Jones would be making one-third of Cousins’s salary for his first four years. There are nuanced critiques of Cousins’s game and whether he can take a team deep into the playoffs but the biggest issue in Minnesota has been that his contract handcuffs the Vikings from filling needs. A cheap version of Cousins would give any team a chance to build a terrific supporting cast.
Recent history points to pretty big rewards for good-but-not-elite quarterbacks on rookie deals.
That’s not to say Jones should be considered a better prospect than the guys with greater tools and in Justin Fields’s case, equal production.
You can make the case that Jones being talked about as potentially better than Fields is an example of the historical inequities that we’ve seen in the analysis of black quarterbacks. Fields has to do more to get the same attention. Those concerns are rooted in historical fact and should be part of the equation. In recent drafts we have seen certain players’ shortcomings enhanced versus others whose issues were downplayed, even when two or three players were top picks (see: Trubisky vs. Mahomes vs. Watson or when Baker Mayfield’s arrest became a joke whereas Cam Newton’s smile was scrutinized).
Kirk Cousins is the wrong guy to use to make that point though. Cousins had to take the long route to become an NFL starter. He was drafted in the fourth round and sat behind Robert Griffin III and battled with Colt McCoy for playing time.
You can be high on Fields and rightly offended by undue criticism for Fields without making Cousins the poster boy for the argument.
The Jones/Cousins point could be logically made this way: If Jones is at this best, he might not still be good enough. If Fields is at his best, he could be among the Jacksons and Mahomes’s and Allens who are breaking the game. If Jones doesn’t become Cousins, he’ll end up as Chase Daniel whereas Fields could be decent even if he doesn’t reach his ceiling.
That’s all fair.
Though it’s worth noting that it’s bizarre how certain we seem to be about everyone’s ceilings and floors. Jameis Winston was supposed to be an X’s and O’s savant. Blake Bortles was a physical beast. Johnny Manziel was a playmaker. Tim Tebow and Vince Young were highly athletic winners. Josh Rosen was accurate. Dak Prescott was too inaccurate to be a starter. So was Jackson.
Comparisons are fun and helpful when informing the public about prospects but saying with any degree of certainty that “this guy will be just like that guy” speaks to our preposterous overconfidence we have when it comes to talking about these prospects. This particular Jones-Cousins comp also seems to have taken on a life of its own that goes beyond fun and helpful. It’s lost any nuance and become unfair to both.
In the same way that common sayings aren’t always true just because people say them over and over, using Cousins as the example of what a team wouldn’t want out of their draft pick’s ceiling is just as shallow as saying, “the grass isn’t always greener.”
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Making comparisons is never a bad thing, but when it becomes a heavy-handed endeavor to cement an loose opinion... fools errand.
I've always viewed "situations" as the ultimate game changer. Seems logical enough, but who's to say if Patrick Mahomes was drafted by Chicago Bears, would he still be the player that he is now? What about Tom Brady?! Some rare talents are unfazed by circumstances, but that curve ball never really seems to get the respect it deserves.
Interesting article. I hadn't minded the Mac Jones/Kirk Cousins comps when discussing the Niners (because they explain why the Niners might theoretically like Mac Jones, given Shanahan's public admiration of Kirk), but you make a compelling argument for how Jones and Cousins profiled very differently at similar points in their career. For me I would say that Mac Jones has a realistic range between Chad Pennington and Matt Ryan, where he clearly can find open players accurately and his ceiling is controlled by how well he can toy with defenses by understanding what the defenses are doing.
Beyond that, I admit I am unsure how useful real athletic scores are for pocket passers. Mac Jones just does not scramble. This year he had 35 rushes for 14 yards and 1 TD. His RAS is basically right between Matt Ryan at 5.77 and Matt Stafford at 6.03, which feels accurate to me. (Incidentally, Jimmy Garoppolo's RAS is about 5.01, for an example of a somewhat improvisational QB who does not have a particularly high RAS.) I buy entirely that RAS is super important for the scrambling/improvising QBs, but it feels like it has minimal relevance to the guys that never run even when they could. It would be really interesting to see how RAS correlates to success for the traditional pocket passers of the league of the last 20 years (Brady, Ryan, Cousins, Stafford, Eli, Peyton, etc.).
Otherwise, I really appreciate how you state that you can be offended by how Justin Fields has been overly attacked, even as it is kind of weird to use Kirk Cousins to prop up Mac Jones. Further, I think it is super easy to be down on both Mac Jones and Justin Fields. To the extent that you think that demonstrating a quick ability to read defenses is important, you should not be high on Justin Fields. Justin Fields did not demonstrate this on anything resembling a statistically significant sample. It's true that his offense didn't ask him to, but that means we have literally no idea if he can. If anyone thinks that he can, they are guessing (which is fine, ranking prospects is largely a guessing game, but I'm just calling a spade a spade). Beyond this, I am concerned about the fact that Justin Fields because when his teammates are not the best he does not seem to rise their level of play. His worst 3 games this year (Indiana, Northwestern, Alabama) were when Ohio was missing some players (such that they were not elite at every level compared to their competition) and then when they were facing Alabama (such that his teammates were not overpowering their competition). Recent history has shown us that many of the QBs that have objectively over-delivered on promise to date (Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar, Herbert, Dak) were on college teams that did not just overpower their components. There are some exceptions (Watson, most notably), but I do not think anyone is being unreasonable for thinking that it is risky to pick a QB that has never/rarely had to deal with being on the worse team on the field, especially when you are picking that QB high (such that, logically speaking, that QB will have to adjust to the NFL while being on one of the worst teams for the next few years). Of course, this counts equally against Mac Jones and Fields, hence why I am down on both of them.