Did Kirk Cousins deserve the Vikings picking a potential replacement?

Talk of replacing the Vikings' QB will dominate now after the Vikings took Kellen Mond and a report that they wanted Justin Fields

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By Matthew Coller

Robert Griffin III grinned a sly grin when he was asked on a Bleacher Report NFL Draft live stream about the Minnesota Vikings selecting Kellen Mond.

RGIII said: “Cousins has been collecting checks there in Minnesota for a long time taking them to 8-8 and 9-7 seasons, if he has a bad start to the year like he did last year, I could see the fans and maybe the organization leaning toward Mond if he comes in and impresses.”

Naturally people called out Griffin III for holding a grudge against Cousins because of the way their time in Washington together worked out but like it or not, RGIII is not going to be alone. You’re about to hear a lot more discussion about the Vikings’ quarterback future beyond Cousins, especially since ESPN’s Courtney Cronin reported that the Vikings were interested in Justin Fields on draft night.

GM Rick Spielman has said that Mond is here to compete for the backup job and that’s true — for 2021. The team has no reason to hit the reset button after spending big to fix the defense in free agency. But Spielman’s statements after picking Mond didn’t take a masterclass in between-the-line reading to figure out that the team wanted somebody opposite of Cousins.

Not only did they pass on a pocket quarterback at 14 in Mac Jones (and another one in Davis Mills in the third), Spielman said that the offensive coaching staff specifically felt a mobile QB could be effective in the Kubiak offense. He also compared Mond to everyone in the org’s favorite quarterback Teddy Bridgewater.

Draft night was like someone saying in front of their blonde partner that they prefer brunettes.

There isn’t really any secret about what’s going on here now. The Vikings flew a flag announcing they are not locked into Cousins.

At the same time, they didn’t go all-in on that direction. They weren’t willing to take any first-round quarterback and Spielman said he called Cousins to let him know they might take a quarterback so he wouldn’t be blindsided.

The one-foot-in-one-foot-out has been done many times before.

The Patriots kept drafting second/third/fourth round QBs while Tom Brady was getting up in age. The Giants did it with Davis Webb and Kyle Lauletta as Eli Manning got older. Pittsburgh took Mason Rudolph in the third with Ben Roethlisberger in his twilight. Philly drafted Jalen Hurts in the second round when they might have wanted out from Carson Wentz. Heck, even Cousins’s pick in the fourth round of the 2012 draft sent up a flare that Washington’s staff might not fully believe in the RGIII pick.

Whether it’s the right approach will play out as we go forward. There is plenty to like about Mond’s game and Cousins has a team around him in 2021 that will give him a chance to make a run in the playoffs.

Something that might get left behind in the discussion is whether Cousins earned the distinction of being a hot-seat quarterback or if the team’s roster building “miscalculations” are being set at his feet or if the nature of the NFL has simply led us here?

The Los Angeles Rams did a more aggressive version of blaming the QB for some miscues and some nature-of-the-beast regression. Their offensive personnel faded around Jared Goff and when his numbers slipped, they traded for Matthew Stafford, essentially pointing the finger at Goff to say, “you did this, not us.”

Is that what’s happening here with the Vikings? Are they pointing the finger at Cousins for missing the playoffs two of the last three years or did Cousins’s performance push them in this direction?

Tricky timelines and needles to thread

When the Vikings signed Cousins in 2018, they had already missed their shot at a Super Bowl.

Think about the rises and falls of NFL teams in recent years that took the same path as the 2017 to 2018-2020 Vikings.

• The Carolina Panthers went to the Super Bowl in 2015 after a 15-1 season. In the subsequent years they went 6-10, 11-5 and 7-9.

• The Atlanta Falcons went to the Super Bowl in 2016 and then went 10-6, 7-9 and 7-9 from 2017-2019.

• The Philadelphia Eagles went to the Super Bowl in 2017 and went 9-7, 9-7, 4-11-1 after that.

• The Jacksonville Jaguars went from the AFC title game in 2017 to drafting No. 1 overall in 2021

You get the picture.

Historically teams do not repeat great seasons without all-time great quarterbacks in their primes. The 1999 and 2010 Vikings discovered this unfortunate truth as well. But the present regime believed in 2018 that bringing in Cousins would fight off regression like antibiotics battle an infection.

They underestimated how much could change between 2017 and 2018. In 2017 they were completely healthy on defense and numerous players like Xavier Rhodes, Everson Griffen and Linval Joseph had career years. Terence Newman played at a high level at age 39 and offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur was hitting on his calls more often than a card counter at a blackjack table.

Those things didn’t happen the following year. Shurmur left, Newman retired, players who peaked the year before didn’t repeat their performance and there were injuries. On the offensive line Joe Berger retired and Nick Easton and Pat Elflein got hurt.

None of these regression events had anything to do with Kirk Cousins.

He didn’t hire John DeFilippo, whose offense was exactly the opposite of what Mike Zimmer wanted. He didn’t play Tom Compton at guard for 16 games or run out Laquon Treadwell in key situations. He didn’t give up a perfect passer rating to Goff in Los Angeles or allow a 39% pressure rate.

Cousins also didn’t sign himself to a contract that would make it difficult to fill in the gaps from players who left or dipped after 2017.

In 2018, Cousins wasn’t any different than he’d ever been. He graded as the league’s 14th best QB by PFF. The previous two seasons he was 18th and 10th.

He’d always been streaky. Over a six-game span to start 2017, Cousins had a 107.2 passer rating and then he was under 90 for the following eight games. That happened in 2018 too, where he opened the year with a 102.5 rating through eight games and then had a stretch with six of eight games under 100 ratings.

He was exactly his same self from the Washington years when it came to games where the O-line was overwhelmed and they needed someone who could escape the pocket.

In order to win with a streaky QB who ranks somewhere between 10th and 18th, the Vikings would have needed 2018 to be just like 2017 in terms of luck and roster strength. Instead it ended up looking much more like 2016 when a bunch of things went wrong with a good QB and they finished .500.

This is the tough needle to thread in the NFL. Everything has to come together and it rarely does in successive seasons. Even the all-time great QBs don’t win back-to-back Super Bowls often.

That doesn’t mean that it made no sense to sign Cousins in 2018. That doesn’t mean that none of it could have been prevented by Cousins.

In 2018 he didn’t have to fumble on the final drive against the Rams in Week 4 or put up seven points against Seattle in Week 14 or have a sideline throw-down with Adam Thielen in Week 17 against a Chicago team that was resting starters in the second half.

We can break down every season in pretty much this exact same way.

In 2019, Cousins didn’t choose to pay a linebacker instead of adding another guard and/or receiver. He did, however, follow a very good performance against the Saints in the Wild Card win with serious struggles against a good 49ers defense.

In 2020, he didn’t let all that defensive talent go but his large cap hit (even after the extension) caused major turnover. He wasn’t even close to the sole reason they went 1-5 to start the year but he led the league in interceptions at that point of the year. He didn’t give up all those points to the Cowboys and Bears but he didn’t beat them when given chances either.

All of Cousins’s seasons in Minnesota speak to the narrow margins that any team with an expensive quarterback plays within. There’s no parachute. If everything doesn’t click, you just fall.

Overall, Cousins’s statistics have been good and the Vikings’ offenses have been good. By his 2019 and 2020 PFF grades and QB ratings, he’s been about the best version of Kirk Cousins that the Vikings could have expected when they signed him. In that way it seems somewhat unfair that coming short of expectations over the last three years has been put on his shoulders. He couldn’t be someone different because they paid him a lot of money.

Does all of that mean Cousins doesn’t deserve the RGIII comments about cashing checks and playing .500 football?

In Brett Favre’s words: Maybe.

Is the future mobile?

When you watch Patrick Mahomes or Kyler Murray or Josh Allen or Russell Wilson or Lamar Jackson, it’s hard not to think about what a dynamic quarterback might have looked like in Minnesota over the past few years as they had an immobile QB, poor interior pass blocking and elite wide receivers. Would a few more plays on the move from the quarterback have been the difference?

The league certainly thinks so. The San Francisco 49ers are moving on from a QB who took them to the Super Bowl in favor of an athlete in Trey Lance, who they spent three first-round picks to take No. 3 overall despite his lack of experience. Mac Jones, a college superstar last year, was the fifth QB taken and all four ahead of him can run.

Per PFF data, Cousins only threw while scrambling on 3% of dropbacks last year. He only took off running on a pass play nine times, the sixth fewest in the league (Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Ryan and Philip Rivers were among those who took off less than Cousins).

Since 2018, Cousins has run for 342 yards, which ranks 22nd among all QBs in that time frame. To put his rushing stats in context, Teddy Bridgewater is only 27 yards behind Cousins in 18 fewer starts. Six quarterbacks are over 1,000 yards.

This comes in addition to a pressure-to-sack conversion rate of 17.2%, 12th highest in the league. That means when pressure comes, it often turns into a sack. Mahomes and Roethlisberger were under 10%.

Do those things really mean the Vikings can’t win without a mobile quarterback?

Certainly the case could be made that there’s a lot of hidden value that goes beyond the box score when it comes to mobility.

Here’s the other side of the coin: PFF’s tracking shows only 5% of the league’s throws are made while scrambling. While Cousins ran on pass plays only nine times, there were 19 starting quarterbacks who took off fewer than 17 times. And when it comes to actual rushing yards, the list of QBs with fewer rushing yards than Cousins includes Derek Carr, Matthew Stafford, Jared Goff, Roethlisberger, Brady, Rivers and Brees.

Bad QBs who are ahead of Cousins in rushing include Sam Darnold, Garner Minshew, Daniel Jones, Blake Bortles and Marcus Mariota.

If we bucket the league’s quarterbacks into pocket or mobile based on having fewer than 20 scrambles and fewer than 200 yards rushing (in at least 10 starts), we find Rodgers, Brady, Mayfield, Carr, Ryan, Brees, Stafford, Rivers, Roethlisberger, Goff, Tagovailoa, Mullens, Dalton, Lock, Trubisky and Burrow.

The future is definitely mobile. Four of the five QBs drafted can run and the expected No. 1 overall pick in 2022 Spencer Rattler is a speedster too. And the advantage is noticeable on paper. Still, during Cousins’s time in Minnesota, the league has featured plenty of pocket quarterbacks. The last five QBs (Ryan, Foles, Goff, Garoppolo, Brady) who represented the NFC in the Super Bowl haven’t been runners or even playmakers on the move.

What those successful pocket QBs have had is either a decade-plus of starting success (and sometimes a ring) or an incredible roster (sometimes via a rookie QB contract).

From all of this, you can view Cousins as having fallen into a tier of QBs that’s both quality and just out of reach from being truly competitive for a Super Bowl without having a 2017-level roster. The roster missed its peak, he wasn’t quite good enough to make up the difference and the contract took away just enough cap space to leave holes.

That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have used cap space in a more savvy way or drafted better. It doesn’t mean Cousins couldn’t have come through when he was needed.

This culmination of events does mean the Vikings were ready on draft night to look at their quarterback situation and consider someone else. Whether Mond ends up starting in 2022 will depend on whether Cousins and the Vikings can thread that needle this season.

Can they? In Brett Favre’s words: Maybe.

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