By Matthew Coller
EAGAN — The Las Vegas Raiders gave Kirk Cousins the option to stay with the team where he had put together a pretty darn good 2026 season to date and put down some roots with his family.
At Wednesday’s press conference to (re)-introduce Cousins to the Minnesota Vikings, he said that GM John Spytek and head coach Klint Kubiak “put the ball in my court” during a meeting on Tuesday’s trade deadline. He didn’t give them an immediate answer, rather he chose to call Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell.
“Just wanted to get on the same page,” he explained.
Cousins admitted that he wouldn’t have gone anywhere where he didn’t already know the lay of the land.
“Kevin knows me,” Cousins said. “He knows what I can handle and what I can’t handle. I think that helps.”
It stands to reason that joining a team in the middle of the season would be very, very difficult if you had to learn an entirely new offense and play caller. And it makes total sense that Cousins wouldn’t want to throw his entire life into disarray to join a totally foreign team.
But it’s also reasonable to suspect that Cousins gave his rubber stamp on the Raiders’ trade to send him to Minnesota for another reason: To reach a place that he never saw during his first stint with the Vikings. Coming to a team with the No. 1 defense and No. 1 special teams in the NFL gives Cousins the things that the team was often lacking during his tenure and a chance to compete in the playoffs with anyone.
If we think back to when Cousins was signed in 2018, the team was coming off an NFC Championship game and was dubbed a “Super Bowl or bust” club. Things did not land the same way in 2018 as they did 2017 as Cousins’ fit in the offense was poor and the defense had more things go wrong than the previous season.
The 2019 season turned out to be his best chance and he won a playoff game on an overtime touchdown pass to Kyle Rudolph but the Vikings were no match for the San Francisco 49ers the following week.
After that, Cousins’ offenses were chasing, chasing, chasing. In part because of his own contract and in part because of age, bad drafting, injuries and many other factors, the Vikings’ defenses ranked 29th, 24th and 28th in points allowed and then as Brian Flores was just ramping up in 2023 Cousins suffered an Achilles injury in Week 8 and was lost for the season.
His first era was always defined by being a day late and a dollar short. Whether it was the Week 17 loss to the Bears in 2018 that cost them the playoffs or the 2019 loss to the Packers late in the season that cost them a chance at the division crown or the defensive meltdown and subsequent fourth-and-8 checkdown against the Giants that eliminated the Vikings in the Wild Card round, the Vikings always seemed so close and so far away with Cousins.
This is his opportunity to wash all of that history away.
Cousins was asked on Wednesday if it feels like a case of unfinished business. Here’s how he replied:
“I think my whole career has felt like unfinished business,” Cousins said. “I don’t know that I would say today is any different than so many other years or moments where you feel like you’ve got something to prove, you’ve got something to accomplish, and there’s more to go get. And I think that was why even this winter I felt. I wanted to go back and play again was I just felt like there was more meat on the bone.”
You wonder from that response if Cousins knew all along that if he played well with the Raiders for a half season that somebody good might need a quarterback at the trade deadline. It just so happened to be his former team.
Cousins has always had more of a chip on his shoulder than people would think considering his dad-vibes demeanor. Yes, he’s the guy who went to a Twins game and sat with the fans and the fella who once nicknamed Christian Darrisaw “Crime dog” after Fred McGriff, who Darrisaw had never heard of because he’s 11 years younger than Kirk and McGriff retired when he was five.
But Cousins’ famed “You like that” scream in Washington always told a story. He has always taken on the underdog role as a quarterback who was barely recruited out of high school (we’ve heard that story several times), and was picked in the fourth round by a team that already had its darling. He was called “Kurt” intentionally by that dopey team’s GM. They wouldn’t sign him long term, so he raked them over the coals with the franchise tag and then he squeezed every dollar out of the desperate Vikings by pitting them against the New York Jets.
Then when Vikings management decided it didn’t want to give him top dollar after a 13-win season, he bet on himself and dropped one of the all-time most baller lines in NFL history, saying “it’s not about the dollars, it’s what the dollars represent.”
Don’t let the smile fool you. The last frontier for Cousins is showing the team who didn’t believe in him enough to pay him like Atlanta did that he can win. He’s out to prove his own franchise wrong.
Of course, the irony is that he’s now very affordable and they have used every salary cap cent to put this loaded team together.
Anyway, Cousins joins a head coach who has something to prove as well.
Following the Vikings’ loss on Monday Night Football to the Buffalo Bills, O’Connell looked like he had seen a ghost. He admitted that he’d never in his career been so frustrated as a play caller and stumbled around with different explanations for how things could have gone so wrong.
On Wednesday, he was Rocky after Mick cut his eye. Like a boxer with a second wind.
“What jumped out was some tight window throws just in rhythm and on time,” O’Connell said of Cousins’ game this year in Las Vegas.
He continued to say that the trust that Cousins had for star tight end Brock Bowers and how he was “throwing him open.”
What does the Vikings’ offense need the most? The ball being thrown into tight windows in rhythm and on time, particularly to the star player who hasn’t been thrown open since December of 2024.
It isn’t hard to envision a world where Justin Jefferson reemerges as one of the NFL’s top receivers once he has a quarterback who has targeted him 521 times in his career and posted a 109.2 passer rating.
But there is an important question: How close is Cousins to the version that everyone remembers? He has good numbers with the Raiders but there is an Achilles injury recovery and 1,109 days between when Cousins last threw a pass in Jefferson’s direction.
“He seems like he’s in great shape,” O’Connell said. “Moving well, fundamentals and all those things look sharp as ever.”
The Raiders are No. 2 in the NFL in passing Expected Points Added, whereas the Vikings are 30th. If Cousins carries over his “sharp as ever” look from Vegas, then O’Connell has a chance to flip narratives on their heads just like Cousins does.
After letting Cousins go and Super Bowl champ Sam Darnold and current NFC East leading QB JJ McCarthy and stumbling with Kyler Murray and Carson Wentz, nobody needs a QB to start feeling the “power of completions” as badly as O’Connell.
He’s come under scrutiny for play calling and the offense’s complexity (see: Kurt Warner’s YouTube channel) over the last two years as QB after QB had issues getting rid of the ball and finding the receivers O’Connell mentions repeatedly when he says “we had some chances out there.”
But if Cousins is able to jumpstart the offense, then the noise will quiet down. Then O’Connell’s argument that the plays are there to be made will seem much more plausible. Then it will seem like Murray just didn’t have it anymore rather than O’Connell not finding a way to fit his skills in the offense. It will seem like McCarthy just wasn’t ready rather than O’Connell not tailoring the offense to his capabilities.
Completing passes, scoring points, giving the defense a rest and winning games makes even the rockiest moments feel as smooth as a ride in a Rolls-Royce.
Can it work in such a short time? After all, we have rarely seen quarterbacks change teams and go onto great things. Joe Flacco joined the Browns midseason and made the playoffs a couple years ago. Taylor Heinicke almost won a playoff game for Washington after signing in December of 2020.
It’s hard to find much history but the Vikings need it to work fast. This week they face off with the Green Bay Packers in a game that could have massive playoff implications. Neither O’Connell or Cousins would commit to him playing this weekend but he has to play. They can’t ask Carson Wentz to go beat the Pack, who just took apart Drake Maye last week.
“He works at it,” O’Connell said. “He’s going to do everything in his power to get comfortable and get ready to go as possible.”
It’s both a very difficult situation and the best situation Cousins has ever had. The opportunity will be there to finish the business he started back in 2018 with the Vikings and it’s also going to be the biggest hill he’s had to climb when it comes to acclimating himself back into the franchise again. No pressure, it’s only everything that’s on the line.
I’m cautiously optimistic at this point, but it’s a tough couple of games to start with. I don’t think KOC is completely off the hook even if Kirk looks amazing and they go deep in the playoffs. For me, he’ll still have shown that he consistently gets QBs to play worse if they aren’t good fits instead of adapting his system to get the most out of his QBs. I know he wanted Maye and QB talent is hard to evaluate, especially in the draft, but his decisions on who to roster and start have been less than stellar.