Kirk Cousins has come a long way
Vikings QB sits down with Purple Insider to break down his first career start and reflect on how much he's grown
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For Kirk Cousins, 2012 was a lifetime ago.
He was 24 years old. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t at the center of any debates. He wasn’t scrutinized for anything he said — in part because nobody asked for his opinion. There were no expectations.
Cousins was that other guy Washington drafted. The Michigan State kid who confused analysts when he was selected.
Bleacher Report’s Matt Miller wrote at the time: “Their third pick [Cousins] gets an F. Why the [Football Team] would draft two quarterbacks in their first four selections is beyond me.”
Funny thing is that at the time the pick was confusing to Cousins himself.
“I remember the day I got drafted I was a little bit disappointed and was not expecting to go where I went in terms of the round or the team going to Washington and I was trying to process that,” Cousins said in a one-on-one with Purple Insider. “I remember my dad mentioning, ‘Think about the fact that Mike Shanahan the head coach drafted you, he had to go out of his way to pick you because it was unconventional and he’s worked with people like Joe Montana, Steve Young and John Elway, if someone who has worked with Joe Montana, Steve Young and John Elway is going out of his way to draft you, that has to be a good reflection on you and also has to mean that he’s going to be willing to coach you and invest in you.’”
Shanahan did exactly that. He and his staff, which was loaded with future head coaches including Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay and Green Bay’s Matt LaFleur, were drawn to Cousins’s attention to detail and fit in the Shanahan-style offense.
“We talked about it from the day we drafted him, just his approach to the game, it’s rare,” LaFleur said this week. “He does everything in his power to be at his best and you could see that early on in the process, just the amount of time that he would spend post practice, the amount of time he would spend in the film room, just watching tape, the types of questions he would come back on a daily basis.”
Even if the staff liked what they saw behind the scenes from Cousins, the 2012 season belonged to Robert Griffin III. He was throwing bombs and running through defenses like only the likes of Randall Cunningham, Steve Young, Steve McNair and Michael Vick had done before.
Entering Week 14 against the Baltimore, Griffin III had 24 total touchdowns to four interceptions, a 104.2 quarterback rating and nearly 3,000 yards passing and 750 yards rushing.
But Griffin got hurt on a late-game drive against the Ravens and Cousins came in. Cousins threw a touchdown to put Washington within two points and then ran for a two-point conversion. He led a game-winning drive in overtime to give Washington a 31-28 victory.
Griffin’s injury was expected to keep the budding star out for at least a week, putting Cousins in the spotlight to make his first career start.
His debut came with little fanfare. A very small portion of the national audience would see a 1 E.T. start between Cleveland-Washington and there was no hype whatsoever with the superstar Griffin III out. Pregame shows didn’t spend much time on the fourth rounder.
But looking back at Cousins’s first start we can see both the talent that Shanahan believed was there from the time he was controversially drafted and how far the Vikings’ franchise quarterback has come. We can see with the benefit of hindsight the long road he traveled and the vast differences in his game and his life then and now.
“The coaches had more confidence in me than I had in myself”
You would think that Shanahan, knowing he’d put his hide on the line by picking Cousins, would ramp things up in practice the week before starting his backup quarterback. It seems natural to turn up the intensity to 11 in order to have the team fully prepared for a rookie’s first start. But that wasn’t Shanahan’s way. Instead he did things as they have always been done, which meant holding nary a padded practice that week.
Shanahan’s philosophy of holding lower impact practices late in the season had come from his time in San Francisco under Bill Walsh. These days coaches have access to data and tracking information that tells them exactly to the number how much workload has been on the back of a player versus how much rest they need to properly recover. The technology didn’t exist in the 1980s to tell teams anything about player health and even in 2012 the NFL didn’t have that level of analytics. All Shanahan had was his belief that Walsh’s gut feeling that players were already worn down enough by that time of year.
“I think we only had one full-speed practice and the rest of the week was entirely walk-throughs, which was a different experience from what I had done in college, which was basically… full speed as much as you could,” Cousins said.
Cousins knew starting was going to be different from coming off the bench for a few plays, as he had twice during the year including the win over the Ravens.
It meant having the added pressure of his first starting appearance being a barometer for whether Shanahan made the right decision in the draft.
“I remember the coaches having more confidence in me than I had in myself,” Cousins said. “They really believed that we would be just fine. I probably had my doubts.”
In a hotel in Cleveland on the night before the game, Cousins said he felt uniquely calm considering what was ahead. He put in the work and understood what it would take to beat the Browns. Plus he was relieved by the fact Cleveland’s notoriously rough December weather was going to avoid that particular Sunday. When he took the field the temperature was in the 50s without gusting winds.
When Cousins stepped into his first huddle as a starter, he was wearing No. 12, which looks odd on him and the late 2000s/mid-2010s jersey updates were not kind to every team. It’s not an aesthetic that would score highly on Project Runway.
“The yellow pants and you say, ‘man, a lot has changed in eight or nine years,’ those burgundy collars they had and then they did away with them,” Cousins said laughing. “My jersey was really baggy, it’s funny looking back.”
Though if the entire game went like the first quarter, Cousins wouldn’t be able to chuckle as much about his garb.
There are a lot of parallels and they are all really good things.”
When every kid playing backyard football dreams of his first NFL start, he pictures it going a little bit differently than the opening stanza of Cousins’s first shot as a pro starter.
He quickly went three-and-out on the first drive and then disaster struck early on Washington’s second possession.
Cousins fired a deep pass into coverage that was tipped and intercepted by the Browns and the quarterback was forced to make the tackle inside his own 10-yard line.
“I don’t think I’ve made a tackle since then,” Cousins said.
The Browns scored on the next play. One of the NFL’s biggest busts in recent memory, Trent Richardson, scored a 6-yard touchdown and Cousins had essentially produced more completions to the other team and more points for the other team than he had for his own.
The next drive didn’t go much better. He completed a 4-yard pass and then was sacked by Jabaal Sheard and Washington punted. Cousins got the ball back, incompleted two more passes and punted again.
Through his first four drives, Cousins was 1-for-6 with four yards and an interception.
This is where it doesn’t hurt to have Kyle Shanahan as an offensive coordinator. The eventual OC of an all-time great Falcons offense and head coach of the Super Bowl runner-up 49ers wasn’t about to back off throwing with his rookie. He dialed up a play that would roll Cousins out and give him either a short completion or a shot at something rare.
“Early in the game I had some struggles, threw an interception and couldn’t get things going and then Kyle [Shanahan] called a bootleg and I got it on the edge and was able to hit a backside post on a bootleg, which we said you only hit about once a decade,” Cousins said. Here was the play:
Last year Cousins hit on the backside post for touchdown twice. Once against the Detroit Lions on a touchdown to Adam Thielen (where he got hurt, coincidentally) and the other on a bomb to Stefon Diggs in a 20-point comeback over the Broncos.
He can’t remember too many other times in his career hitting the same throw.
“Those are the only three that I’ve hit on that play my entire career,” he said. “Hitting that touchdown to Leonard Hankerson kind of got us going and then we never looked back.”
We know this now about Cousins: When he gets hot, he can fling it all over the field. In his two years as a Minnesota Viking, Cousins has nine games with quarterback ratings over 115 and is 7-1-1 in those contests.
After halftime, he got hot. Washington went into half down 14-10. They came out and scored touchdowns on four of the next five drives.
It’s not a coincidence that his best games have come when the Vikings are hitting on play-action throws. That was the case for Cousins from the very start. Per Pro Football Focus, he ran 21 play-action throws out of 41 total drop backs. Here’s a few of them:
“I think we ran like 11 bootlegs that day,” Cousins said. “Some teams may run 11 bootlegs in a whole season. I think the bootleg really helped us that day and some other play-action passes that we hit and it didn’t force me to be in a dropback type game. The combination of running the ball well, getting a lead, the defense being able to help us keep a lead and running those bootlegs took some of the pressure off my shoulders, which is partly why coach Shanahan was so confident because he felt schematically there were some things he could do or the coaching staff could to to take the pressure off of me.”
It all sounds so familiar because it is.
Vikings offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak worked under Shanahan for many years in Denver and shares his wide zone run/play-action philosophy. When the Vikings first signed Cousins in 2018, they used a very different system which did not fit Cousins’s skill set anywhere near as well.
“There are quite a few similarities…and I think that’s evidenced by some of the bootlegs and play-actions but also the run game and how the run game presents itself to the defense is very similar and the success of the run game,” Cousins said. “You look at what we were able to do last year and how we improved. I remember back in 2012 how well we ran the football as a team that whole season. There are a lot of parallels and they are all really good things.”
Last year Cousins had a 129.9 quarterback rating when using play-action and the Vikings dialed it up for him the sixth most per drop back of any quarterback in the NFL.
“There were so many plays that were not well executed by me”
When the dust settled, Cousins was on a plane flying home feeling about as good as you can feel. Washington won 38-21 and his final line was outstanding: 26-for-37, 329 yards, two touchdowns and one interception, good for a 104.4 rating.
His memory of the game is remarkable but that’s in part because he’s gone back to reference it numerous times since then.
“When I’ve gone back and watched that game for different reasons to show a coach a play that worked or whatever I’m trying to gain from watching an individual play or parts of that game,” Cousins said. “It is amazing to see that even in a win and a game where we scored 38 points and threw for 300-some yards, there were so many plays that were not well executed by me and that were missed reads and you say, ‘man, I’ve gotten so much better,’ and I was kind of lucky that day to have such a productive day knowing there were so many things that I needed to learn and improve upon.”
He gave an example: This ugly play that was flagged for intentional grounding.
“I had a post route that was wide open and the version of myself now would likely be able to read that just fine and hit that post route,” he said. “Back then my eyes just didn’t have the same discipline or experience that you would need to be able to make that read and make that throw decisively.”
Regardless of the bumps in the road at the beginning and some messy reads and footwork at times, Cousins came away having shown his potential. But it was not an easy ride from there.
“If anything it may have given me a false sense of security,” Cousins said. “You have only one start and play well and you think that maybe they are all going to be like this and it was far from it.”
In the following two seasons, he went 1-7 as a starter with more interceptions than touchdowns and a 74.3 quarterback rating.
But Washington gave him a chance even after Shanahan was gone. Without that first start and evidence that he could execute the offense at a high level, who knows how many chances he would have gotten.
Cousins won the starting job in 2015 and put together one of the best quarterback seasons in the NFL that year with over 4,000 yards passing and a 101.6 rating.
You already know the rest of his history — though nobody would have dreamed it on the day he was drafted or before his first start.
“It’s more fun to look back when you can smile on it and chuckle when you feel like everything worked out and so it’s even better knowing that life led you down the right path to the right place,” Cousins said.
He’s come a long way.
Still Cousins enters Week 1 against the Green Bay Packers trying to meet expectations and looking to prove right the people in the Vikings’ front office who believed in him and the coaches who are confident in him. And he’ll have a running game and play-actions and bootlegs to take the pressure off.
So maybe some things don’t change as much as we think.
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