Everyone is wrong about Kirk Cousins
Another Cousins hot streak has people re-thinking their stances on the Vikings' QB
Never has there been a quarterback whose status in the league is more determined by what just happened more than Kirk Cousins. Every game is a referendum. Depending on the performance, every game is proof that he’s either an elite quarterback capable of winning a Super Bowl or sucking the Minnesota Vikings’ franchise into a quicksand of mediocrity.
There has been no better example of the Cousins analysis pendulum than the last two weeks. When Cousins failed to lead a game-winning drive against the Dallas Cowboys, it was clear evidence that the 32-year-old quarterback is not a winner and can’t be trusted in the biggest moments. When Cousins led a game-winning drive the very next week against the Carolina Panthers, it was decided that he’s turned a corner and is now very capable of leading the Vikings to the promised land.
This isn’t a new thing. Fans of the Washington Football Team fought for three years over whether Cousins was a franchise quarterback. Even the team couldn’t decide, offering him a middling contract at best (and then tweeting out the details of their offer). When he arrived in Minnesota in 2018, Cousins quickly won over purple faithful with a 429-yard showing against Green Bay, only to score six points in a dreadful loss to Buffalo the next week. He then totally redeemed himself with another great game against the Rams.
It’s been that way during his entire tenure as a Viking. In 2019, analysts wanted to fire Cousins into the sun after a Week 4 loss to Chicago in which he apologized to Adam Thielen publicly after the game for missing a key throw. He followed up by winning Player of the Month. In the playoffs, Cousins beat the Saints in brilliant fashion and then threw for 172 yards the next week in a loss to the 49ers.
This year he was leading the league in interceptions before turning a corner out of the bye week. Since Week 6, Cousins has a 124.3 quarterback rating, 12 touchdowns, one interception and has elevated himself to Pro Football Focus’s fifth highest graded quarterback.
So what are we to make of Cousins’s most recent blazing hot streak? Has something changed? Should the Vikings throw all of their scouting reports on first-round quarterbacks out the window? Or is this just another peak before a valley? Should the Vikings use the final stretch of this season to evaluate Cousins or rest on the larger sample?
The record
A quarterback’s win-loss record offers quite the conundrum for those trying to do in-depth analysis. On one hand, it seems silly to blame one person for the entire fate of 22 players on offense and defense, coaching decisions, schemes, game plans, weather, kicking and plain old good/bad luck.
On the other side of that coin, the best quarterbacks win and the worst quarterbacks lose. Fran Tarkenton is the best quarterback the Vikings have ever had by a country mile and he won a lot more than he lost (91-73-6). Christian Ponder was not a good quarterback and he won 14 times in 36 starts.
Kirk Cousins wouldn’t be debated nearly as much if his record wasn’t right down the middle at 49-48-2.
One way you can use a QB’s win-loss record is to pick it apart and find out why Cousins doesn’t have a winning percentage like Peyton Manning (.702) or Aaron Rodgers (.655). Is it circumstances? Physical skill differences? Mental differences? Intangibles?
One place we can start is separating the individual performance from team results. There are a few different statistics that help us in that endeavor (though neither is be-all, end-all). ESPN’s QBR attempts to weigh a QB’s play vs. game situation and tell us what percentage of the time a particular showing results in a win. So Cousins’s game against Dallas two weeks ago, for example, earned him a 77.0 QBR. That basically means that 77% of the time a quarterback plays like Cousins did, they win. Unfortunately for him, Justin Jefferson dropped a pass and protection broke down on the final drive and they didn’t win.
If we plot out all of Cousins’s games as a Viking by QBR compared to the NFL’s hands-down best quarterback Patrick Mahomes, we see a pretty clear difference: Volatility.
Mahomes never plays at a level that gives his team less than a 50% chance to win, where as Cousins has multiple games per season in which this is the case. And his lows are sometimes very low. This year he registered a 9.5 QBR against Indianapolis and last season an 8.6 vs. Green Bay in Week 2. It’s the occasional dramatically bad game that drives his critics to the peak of frustration.
Another way to look at Cousins’s play is by his Pro Football Focus grades on a game to game basis. Here’s how they break down for each season:
On PFF grades:
Anything below 50 means the QB had a lot of poor throws and/or turnover worthy plays.
Between 50-65 either means a mix of both good/bad throws or was unremarkable without turnover-worthy plays
65-80 means more good than bad
80+ means the QB made mostly very good to great throws with very few miscues
What you see in the pie chart above is that Cousins has a lot more good than bad but most of his games are somewhere in the middle. Mahomes only had one game below 65 in 2018, four below 65 in 2019 (one was the Super Bowl) and two below 65 this year. So that’s seven below average games in 47 starts or 14.8%. Cousins has a 65 or below graded game in 31.8% of games.
Of course, even the most hardcore Cousins supporter isn’t calling him Mahomes but comparing him to the league’s best QB tells us something about why the critiques of Cousins are tricky. (Not to mention that Cousins has higher salary cap hits in 2020, 2021 and 2022, which is rightfully a major factor in his detractors’ critiques). In his best games, Cousins can be as good as Mahomes by QBR or PFF metrics. Those games are wowing. But he has far more down games than Mahomes.
So when Cousins is having an uptick, the people who call him an elite quarterback can ride high. When he has a downturn, the folks who want a 2021 first-round quarterback can sound the alarms. And back-and-forth we volley week by week.
Often times his record and good game/bad game volatility is determined by things around him. Cousins is 0-11 vs. defenses that rank in the top 10 in QB rating allowed since joining the Vikings and 17-4-1 against teams in the bottom 10.
Former Viking Terence Newman made a point about this in a recent piece by former Bleacher Report author Tyler Dunne on his new venture Go Long.
“He’s a damn good quarterback, he can throw the ball with the best of them,” Newman told Dunne. “But like most undersized quarterbacks, once you have a team that has a good pass rush, that quarterback is probably going to get antsy.”
Take games against the Packers and Bears in 2019 for example. In Week 2, 2019, versus Green Bay, Cousins was pressured on 23 of 35 drop backs and completed seven passes on those 23 chances. Against Chicago’s ruthless defense in Week 4, he was pressured 16 times, sacked six and completed just seven passes for 53 yards.
The following month he saw far less impressive fronts and put together marvelous performances. In Week 5 2019, Cousins was under duress on just nine of 31 drop backs and finished the game with over 300 yards and a 138.6 rating.
It speaks to the difference between him and some QBs that are considered elite by all onlookers a la Mahomes, Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers. Those QBs have more physical gifts.
Which leads us to another part of his win-loss record that gets highly debated: The game-winning drive.
The most common opinion is that Cousins isn’t really up for those spots.
“Sometimes,” Newman told Dunne, “the moment’s just too big for people. It’s a lot of pressure. You either bolt or you rise to the occasion. Unfortunately, for Minnesota, their quarterback has not risen to the occasion very often.”
But quarterback analyst Derrik Klassen has a more reasonable explanation: That Cousins’s physical tools impact him in certain circumstances more than some of the world’s best.
“He’s not going to be able to make opportunities that aren’t there,” Klassen said on the Purple Insider podcast. “So when you get into these situations they are almost entirely dependent on the quarterback making an opportunity for themselves and you’re not a quarterback who really has a trump card — even if you’re otherwise a pretty decent quarterback — you kind of fall into a situation where the game situation is such that you can’t really play within the structure of the offense and you don’t have anything that helps you play out of it.”
Again, however, there is a middle ground that gets missed. Cousins’s actual numbers in those game-winning spots aren’t bad. Since he came to Minnesota, there have been 10 contests in which he had the ball in his hands with a chance to win or tie the game. He came through four times, including the Vikings’ playoff win over New Orleans last year.
Plus the game-winning drive stat is ridiculous.
Over his career, Cousins has game-winning drives in 15.1% of his games. That’s higher than Mahomes’s 14.2%. Fran Freaking Tarkenton led game-winning drives on only 13.9% of his starts. There’s a pretty simple explanation: Mahomes and Tarkenton were usually ahead. Cousins had his career high in game-winning drives during the season he played with his worst supporting cast (2017).
It comes back to our original premise. If you are adamant that Cousins is capable of succeeding in big moments, you’re right sometimes. If you tell everyone that he can’t come through when his team needs him most, you’re right sometimes.
Is something changing?
Every year of Kirk Cousins’s career, he’s had a crazy-good hot streak. In a post earlier this week here on Purple Insider, I laid them out:
2015: Cousins had a five-game stretch from late November until the end of the season in which he threw 14 touchdowns, one interceptions and posted a 125.3 rating.
2016: Managed a 114.0 rating from Week 7 to Week 11 and averaged 369 yards passing per game.
2017: From Week 2 to Week 6, Cousins had a 115.9 rating, 11 touchdowns and just two picks.
2018: Had a four-game run from Week 2 to Week 5 in which he completed 74% of passes and 107.0 rating.
2019: Put together a 125.6 rating over a seven-game run that included a Player of the Month award
2020: Since Week 8, Cousins has a 124.3 rating, 12 touchdowns and one INT.
You might chalk his recent performances up to a routine hot streak like a home run hitter blasting 15 bombs in a month and then hitting a handful the rest of the year.
But something seems different.
Not only did Cousins make plays at the end of the game last week against Carolina, he played extremely well when things broke down and he was forced to complete key throws out of the structure of the offense.
Offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak said improving his playmaking ability was a point of emphasis entering the season.
“When he came back from last year, we had kind of put together a book and said here’s some things we want to improve upon and that was a big key, making more plays with your feet and bailing us out of some bad situations or some bad calls with [his] movement,” Kubiak said.
The Vikings’ OC, who is legendary for raising the level of every QB he comes in contact with, pointed to one specific play against the Panthers in which Cousins shined despite the structure of the offense breaking down.
“That third-and-12 late in the game when we’re down two scores, he makes a great play to Bisi that kind of jump-started us and got us going,” Kubiak said. “He’s made some strides in that case and hopefully there’s more to come.”
It seems counterintuitive that anyone would be able to improve their ability to go off schedule. After all, its name implies that it’s more nature than nurture. But that doesn’t stop Kubiak from trying.
“What you do is you try to orchestrate defensively,” Kubiak said. “I’ll go in the back end with the defense and say, ‘OK. I want you to do this and take this guy away. Kirk doesn’t know it.’ So I put him through certain progressions and take this route away or that route away so that he has to move.”
This part of Cousins’s game has been on his mind for awhile. He mentioned it multiple times during the offseason and said he’s seen growth in his ability to step up when things break down.
“I do think that’s been an area of improvement this year for me, but you have to keep it going, right?” Cousins said. “There’s still a lot of games left and you have to keep showing that improvement every single week. But I think as we were saying in August, I think the ability is there to do it … you just have to want to do it more and have it show up more. I think that was the reason to emphasize it. If that wasn’t my style of play, and there are certain quarterbacks where they’re not built to do that, then probably don’t talk about it as much and try to work on it. I think it’s there to take advantage of.”
There have been other times in which Cousins got the tag of being too conservative with his decisions. His former coach Jay Gruden once famously told a story about chastising Cousins because nobody can scheme receivers open all the time. Risks need to be taken in order to win.
This year has been much different in that area than 2019 per NFL NextGen stats. In 2019, Cousins only threw 12.8% of his passes when a defender was in “tight coverage” with a receiver. That was the fourth lowest percentage in the NFL. This year, he has the sixth highest percentage at 18.4%.
It’s paying off. NextGen ranks Cousins second in completion percentage above expectation based on the proximity of defenders.
There’s a similar question here as the increase in off-schedule play: Did Cousins suddenly learn aggressiveness during the bye week?
Could it be that the team’s 1-5 record took the pressure off? Could it be the emergence of Justin Jefferson? Could it be improved pass protection following the switch from Dru Samia to Ezra Cleveland/Brett Jones? Could it be the schedule that has matched Cousins against eight of the bottom 10 teams in QB rating against this season?
And most importantly: Can we really get the answer to these questions over the next five games? The Vikings only play one top 10 defense in QB rating against the rest of the way (New Orleans) so things are set up for a continued hot streak and playoff run.
But what if the schedule is tougher next year? What happens when expectations go back to Super Bowl or bust rather than nobody-believes-in-us? Can it ever sustain long enough to win 12 or 13 games to put the Vikings in a spot to have home field advantage in the playoffs?
We know the supporting cast is going to be there. The Vikings have invested a great deal in recent years in draft picks like Brian O’Neill, Garrett Bradbury, Ezra Cleveland, Irv Smith Jr. and Jefferson.
The question the Vikings may still be asking themselves at the end of this year — whether they go on a magical run to the playoffs or not — is whether they can ever escape The Great Cousins Debate. Whether his QBR/PFF game breakdowns will ever lean far enough in the good/great direction to reach that 12-14 win level.
The rest of this year might not hold all the answers but with five more good games Cousins can at least make some people more wrong than others — even if everyone is wrong in some ways about him.
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I love how much of an unknown Kirk is game to game - always builds the mystery going into the game
Good read! I think there is something that we can take away from the next 5 games. This Vikings team isn't good, and if they are going to make the playoffs, it will be on the back of Kirk Cousins. The two remaining games that stick out to me are the Tampa and New Orleans games. Even if the Vikings lose those games, it would be great to see Cousins play well!