Vikings fans' reaction to Netflix's 'Quarterback:' A new appreciation for Kirk Cousins

Seven Vikings take you through their reactions to watching new documentary series focused around Cousins

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By Matthew Coller

BINGE WATCHING — Think you know the challenges of playing quarterback in the NFL? Well, a new documentary series on Netflix titled Quarterback argues that you have no idea what quarterbacks go through at the highest level.

The NFL Films and Omaha Productions eight-part series went behind the scenes with Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota during the 2022 season and captured the Super Bowl winning Chiefs, a roller coaster Vikings season and a year of struggle for the Falcons. Having not watched an NFL game since early February and with training camp around the corner, Netflix timed its release perfectly to reach football fans who are frothing at the mouth for the upcoming season. The show ranked No. 1 on Netflix last week, just ahead of the new season of The Lincoln Lawyer.

Naturally, Vikings fans are among the most intrigued by the series considering all of the memorable moments from last season. A new coach, the game of the year, the largest comeback in NFL history and the disappointment of the loss in the Wild Card round alone would make for a fascinating deep dive. But there is something more captivating about Cousins in particular because everyone seems to have a strong opinion about him and he’s always been an enigma of highs and lows throughout his five years in Minnesota.

So did the people who have watched him the most learn anything about their QB1? Were minds changed? Were they captivated or uninspired by Cousins’s parts of the show?

On Saturday I asked on Twitter for fans’ perspectives on the show and then spent the afternoon talking to seven Vikings fans on the phone from four different states ranging from college age to watched-Fran Tarkenton age who viewed Quarterback and gave a wide range of thoughts an opinions based on the show. The most common thread from all of them, though, was a much deeper respect for Cousins.

The first call was from Rob, a 28-year-old from Plymouth who went to the University of Minnesota.

For most of his life growing up in Minnesota, he wasn’t a hardcore Vikings fan but when he went to college that changed. The 2014 draft was the first one he watched and he was drawn in by Teddy Bridgewater and the hard-nosed 2015 team that won the NFC North. Of course, he learned what it’s like to give your heart to the Vikings when Blair Walsh missed a 27-yard field goal in the playoffs and Bridgewater suffered a catastrophic injury the following camp.

“I was a guy tweeting you, ‘How’s Teddy looking?’” Rob says, laughing.

Rob was drawn into Quarterback by the portrayal of the relationship between head coach Kevin O’Connell and Cousins. Based on O’Connell’s less intense approach in comparison to his predecessor, Rob wondered if KOC would be able to be a hard-nosed leader in the moments that mattered.

“There was a little bit nagging to me, like, is he really coaching these guys and being tough on them? And to see him interacting with Cousins was really interesting,” Rob said. “In the Buffalo game where he did his own audible to the sneak and KOC was telling him, ‘I could have given you a better formation, what are you doing, I was trying to call timeout.’ The Miami game when he was like, ‘calm down.’ I think that was really cool to see that coaching.”

In Cousins’s first four years in Minnesota, he and former head coach Mike Zimmer didn’t often seem to be on the same page. Rumors often floated that Zimmer didn’t want to sign Cousins and the quarterback was given a revolving door of offensive coordinators, with a different play caller in his ear each year. O’Connell’s attention to his quarterback was on display throughout the show.

“It gave me more reassurance about KOC as a coach and the way he works with quarterbacks in his offense,” Rob said. “Especially since it was the first year with a new system and everything, it gives me a little more hope for what we’re going to see this year.”

Rob described himself as being “somewhere in the middle” on Cousins — which is an unusual place to be, if you’ve ever looked at social media on a game day — but said that his opinion improved after seeing what the Vikings’ QB went through in order to play every game last season.

“I wondered if he had a little bit more protection, could he actually be our guy?” Rob said. “I think the gap to Cousins to Mahomes in terms of the way they play, prepare, leadership in the room and on the field in my mind coming out of this seemed smaller than the gap between Cousins and Mariota, whereas going in I would have thought the opposite…Maybe he’s a little bit more rare than I thought.”

For Thomas, a 37-year-old from Hopkins, learning about Cousins’s toughness and dedication was the highlight of Quarterback.

Thomas has a Viking tattoo on his left bicep and his brother has one on his right bicep. They got the tats after the team signed a lease deal for the new stadium so their homages to the team would remain relevant. Getting inked up was nothing in comparison to the pain Cousins felt throughout the 2022 season as he was taking hit after hit. Cousins leads the show in classic NFL Films ‘ughhghhghgh” sounds, by a country mile as his ribs are smashed by Washington Commanders defensive linemen. At one point, Cousins stays down and then comments that he would have gotten up faster if he knew the completed pass didn’t score and thanks Washington for playing man coverage against Justin Jefferson.

“I didn’t realize how much pain he was playing through,” Thomas said. “They said bruised ribs, it wouldn’t shock me if there were a ton of cracked ones in there. Just the fact he was able to stay in the pocket and take those huge hits as he was releasing passes down the field, that really impressed me. I knew he was tough but I didn’t realize he was that tough.”

Thomas paused the show during the highlights from the Buffalo game. He was at that game with a group of friends who go on a Vikings road trip each year. One of his buddies can be spotted if he stops the stream at the right moment.

“I’ve been telling him he’s famous on Netflix now,” Thomas said.

It wasn’t just how Cousins kept getting back up after the hits but how he recovered. Fans usually never see the ice cold pool to reduce swelling and rehab work done simply to give him a chance to play the following week. Quarterback peeled back that curtain. It also demonstrated how all-consuming being QB1 can be for a family. That stood out to Thomas as well.

“It consumes their life,” he said. “His wife traveling to every game, his kids in the locker room after the game. Being a professional quarterback means that every member of that family is going to be completely impacted by this.”

Since watching the series, Thomas has been talking to his wife about how he feels about Cousins and the Vikings’ future at quarterback. On one hand, he was wowed, especially by the humanizing parts, like one scene that shows Cousins celebrating a Washington employee beating cancer. On the other hand, the NFL has realities like a salary cap and Cousins’s age.

“Do I want them to sign him to a mega contract so he’s here when he’s 40? I don’t know if it changed my mind on that,” Thomas said. “I really like him but I’m ready for the Vikings to try to trade up for that first-round draft pick quarterback.”

Ben from Florida, a 33-year-old who started watching the Vikings because of Randy Moss. He liked the chip on Moss’s shoulder and enjoyed every minute of him proving the teams wrong that let him slip in the draft. The Viking fandom stuck after that.

Ben points out something that goes underappreciated when folks do their yearly quarterback rankings: Cousins always plays. In five years with the Vikings, he has missed two games. One was due to COVID, the other was sitting out because the Vikings clinched their playoff spot in 2019. He’s one of only four quarterbacks to start 80 games (Brady, Rodgers, Carr) since 2018.

“I left the show thinking, man, it doesn’t matter the circumstances, Kirk Cousins is always going to be ready to play,” Ben said. “Nobody talks about a player’s availability, we talk about how well he can perform on the field but he can’t perform if he’s not on the field. That’s the most underrated part of Kirk Cousins’s game. He’s always available. I was watching like, ‘How is he getting up after getting whacked right there?’ Every other play he was getting pounded into the ground and he keeps getting up.”

Like Rob, he saw O’Connell as one of the big winners of Quarterback. Ben sees the Vikings as being in a good place even beyond Cousins because they have a coach who can guide the QB.

“I think the Vikings got the best coach out of that hiring cycle,” Ben said. “Any coach can draw up an X’s and O’s play but it takes special skill to be able to talk and connect with different types of players on your roster. If you have a head coach and quarterback combo on the same page you’re going to win a lot of games even if things aren’t always going right…The coach-quarterback combo means more than any of us thought. ”

Through of all the scenes, Ben’s favorite was Cousins talking to his kids after the playoff loss.

“It was heartwarming when Cousins was telling his kids that he lost the playoff game,” Ben said. “You could see in his face how much it bothered him.”

Ben has been in the camp of moving on at quarterback after this season. Did it change his take?

“Great guy, great teammate,” Ben said. “Franchises who need a quarterback in 2024, if you’re not calling Cousins then you’re not serious about trying to turn your organization around.”

On the matter of Cousins’s most human moments, Xander, a 19-year-old football player at University of Jamestown, appreciated seeing that Cousins was hurting after the loss to the Giants. He was too. Xander grew up in Wyoming but his Northern Iowa-native dad put Viking pajamas on him from the time he could walk.

“I remember that game and I was feeling pretty down for a couple days,” Xander said. “After the game he drives home with his wife and talks about how he doesn’t feel like the season is over and goes home and puts his kid to bed. They read a story about quarterbacks and Kirk sings to him and they pray together and he goes to bed. It means a lot to him and takes a big toll on him but it shows that his values in life are a lot more important than just football.”

He liked the way Cousins approached life, religion and the media narratives about him, which the QB surprisingly rebuffed by quoting Margaret Thatcher. Just as much, the young football player, who redshirted as a freshman cornerback last year, got a kick out of seeing how much mental capacity goes into playing in the NFL.

“Episode 4 was called ‘Mind Games’ and it talked about the mental side of learning plays and adjusting to different defenses and things like that — that was the most interesting to me because I love that side of the game, the battle within the battle,” Xander said.

The episode showed the painstaking effort the quarterbacks go through in order to simply memorize the playbook. At one point Cousins remarks, “plays on plays on plays.”

“I like seeing how the quarterback was preparing for that versus a corner because there’s no way I’m learning as much as he is from a week-to-week basis,” Xander said. “It’s cool to see the effort they put in and how complex it can get. For a guy like me that was the most interesting and best way I could connect it with playing college football is how much work goes into that side of it.”

Xander was pretty hyped by Quarterback. It got him thinking about the QB’s perspective and what he can do as a cornerback to counter all their tactics.

“I’m obsessed with football,” he said excitedly.

Back to that car ride scene. That’s the one that connected with Joey, who is from Columbus Ohio and was raised by a Tarkenton-era dad. He’s 30, so that’s 30 years worth of Vikings fandom, he says.

What does it really feel like to have the gut-punch of losing a playoff game? What is that drive home like? Quarterback shows viewers with Cousins talking with his wife Julie about the plays he wants back and how he felt like the season wasn’t supposed to end that day.

“A playoff game in that profession has to be as high of a high can be,” Joey said. “That drive him with him dissecting it and how much it truly stuck with him. That resonates. That stuck with me. The way he could nitpick one or two plays and just how much he cares. At the end of the day these people are human, they’re not just robots. It takes all that punishment to even get there and then it all just evaporates in a few seconds. It has to be a humbling feeling.”

That all hit home for Joey. Just like in 2017 when US Bank Stadium played host to the Super Bowl and the Vikings had the Minneapolis Miracle, Joey felt like the Vikings were a team of destiny, only to be turned away at the doorstep.

Joey hadn’t really been a Cousins guy before and he was hesitant to say that he’s on board with a long-term extension after watching Quarterback but he did feel like he understood Cousins much better than before.

“Prior to this you felt like he was just trying to get a paycheck, going through the motions but you don’t see all the studying, the psychologist and all that they go through to play the position in general especially doing it in front of millions of fans,” Joey said.

“If you’re still hating on him after this, you’re just a hater,” he said.

Chris, a 31-year-old fan who lives behind enemy lines in Milwaukee. His dad was born in Detroit Lakes — “maybe you’ve head of it,” he jokes — and he was raised in Alaska. Cold places only, apparently. After watching the documentary, he felt Cousins showing his personality now that he is out from under Zimmer was most noticeable.

“How quirky he is, it seems like he’s finally leaning into his brand of weird, which is kind of cool especially compared to the Zimmer years where it seemed like he was scared to do anything,” Chris said. “He’s also pseudo defending himself by saying he’s got game balls from night games and he’s not doing too bad. I respected it. And him signing jerseys after the biggest loss of his career, I was like wow, how could you not like this guy.”

He thinks that a lot of the best moments from last season wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t have that newfound comfort. The long touchdown run where folks started calling him “Kirk Vick?” Does he have the confidence to go for that in years past?

“It was kind of hard evidence that he is feeling himself a little more,” Chris said.

Something that stood out to many Vikings fans about the show was the differences between Cousins and Mahomes. Chris noticed that the parts featuring the NFL’s best QB were like a highlight and hype reel, while Cousins’s season was more agonizing.

“I read a tweet that said something like, ‘Mahomes makes quarterback seem like it’s the coolest thing in the world and Cousins makes it seem like you’d rather work 14-hour construction job than be an NFL quarterback,’” Chris said laughing.

“I see on Twitter those things about getting $10 million to get a few yards in the NFL, yeah, good luck buddy,” Chris added.

Chris also had a common question among fans. The show reveals that Cousins takes Tuesdays off, which he found to be a little odd. It wasn’t noted in the scene that the whole roster is not required to come into the building on Tuesdays. Cousins uses that day to focus on his family. Some players watch extra tape, others do community things but it isn’t as unique to Cousins as the show presented.

Anyway, our final phone call was with Bill, who is from Greenville, Ohio. The reason Bill goes last is that he’s the only one who reached out that remembers watching Fran Tarkenton. In 1977, Bill had a Super Bowl bet with his grandfather. Because he liked the Vikings’ helmets more than the Raiders, he took Minnesota. He lost the bet but decided that was his team and he’s rooted for the purple ever since.

A few years ago, Bill, an Ohio State alum who served as a grad assistant for the football team in the early 90s, wanted the Vikings to trade up and take Buckeye Justin Fields. He thought this year they should look long and hard at CJ Stroud. After watching Quarterback, Bill is now convinced the Vikings should give Cousins an extension.

“After watching that I’m leaning towards [keeping Cousins]. I think he has a good three to four more years left in him,” Bill said.

What changed his mind?

“The amount of work that he puts into the game planning with his body and with his mind,” Bill said. “There are different aspects that you don’t think of… I’ve been around football but I’ve never seen anybody do anything along those lines. Technology and medical advances have come a long way but the amount of time and effort he puts into it….is remarkable. Week after week after week to the point where he’s another coach on the field. That was extremely impressive to me.”

Bill liked that there was a little fire between Cousins and O’Connell. Watching O’Connell be adaptable to his QB got the long-time Vikings fan jacked up about what the offense can do in Year 2 of KOC.

“I think they’re going to take off to another level with another year in the same system,” he said.

What he loved most about Quarterback though was it was about the Vikings. When Bill was growing up the only way he could stay in touch with his team was Bob Lurtsema’s Viking Report newsletter that was delivered to his house. In college he went to the library to find Star Tribune and Pioneer Press to read the sports sections. Now his oldest son helps keep him connected with suggestions of media to watch/listen/read. It’s almost like being in Minnesota for him now. Quarterback brought him even closer to his team. That’s pretty great, no matter what happens at QB in the near future.

“It’s the journey you really enjoy and I’ve enjoyed the journey,” Bill said.

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ADDITIONAL NOTE — A number of other fans reached out with Twitter messages and emails about the show. Here’s a few of their thoughts:

Scotty Mac: “I was amazed at the amount of studying and physical therapy required to handle the job. I also found it interesting that of the 3 men it focused on, only one seemed naturally outgoing and comfortable in what most of us would think of as a leadership role. How much does that correlate to winning?Certainly other factors, such as coaches, teammates and circumstances also factor in, but it’s an interesting question.”

Michael C.: “The way Cousins was presented was really interesting and obviously his toughness being shown with the recovery aspect was quite cool coming from a former high level athlete (professional figure skater here). I think the biggest impression I was left with was that KOC is the real deal and his way of how he handled Kirk and learned how to coach him throughout the season was so impressive. The way he handled the Kirk situation with the QB sneak at the end of buffalo was so impressive, kept his composure and how he spoke and worked through that instead of ripping Kirk out which basically that own play call should’ve ended that game.”

Mark M: “I have to say as hard as I have been on Kirk and I still don’t think he has the make up to take the Vikings to the Championship my respect for him has grown after seeing half of these episodes of Quarterback.  One of the things you have pointed out is his durability.  After seeing what he does each week to put his body back together is very revealing.  Having that chiropractor couple come over each week, him getting into the cold pool and how he works to train his brain is very impressive.  You have always remarked how he gets all he can out of his ability.  But did you ever appreciate it was to this extent?”

Connor J: “I’ve always liked Kirk Cousins because he seems to always stay true to himself and has been a consistently good player. I recognize he may not be elite but teams can, and have, won a lot of games with and because of him. I thought the show illustrated how tough Kirk can be too. Not sure how much we understood how hurt Kirk was. He has taken a beating the past few years, especially last season, but he keeps playing. His availability is definitely an under appreciated trait. I also enjoyed hearing about how much he physically, mentally, and spiritually prepared for games. He appears to devote all this time to football and his family. Overall, I went into this show appreciating and liking Cousins. After watching, I do appreciate him even more.”

RedNPurple77: “Thought kirk came across as very nice, kind, intelligent, talented. One thing I think he lacks compared to Mahomes (apart from the obvious) is the mental presence on the sideline. Feel like Kirk could improve there.”

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