Kirk Cousins Has Mastered the Art of Making NFL Owners Squirm
We cannot all be artists. We cannot all look cool while doing our jobs, says the sports writer with confidence. We cannot all be working on our novels, cradling our profound secrets about the human condition. We cannot all play guitar.
This is especially true when you look at someone like Kirk Cousins, who dresses like an assistant high school band teacher and only rents from the economy plus section of Enterprise. But he is also proof that words like cool and artist are subjective, especially when you apply them to one’s particular craft. And when it comes to making money and maximizing one’s situation, Cousins is Miles Davis.
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How else could you describe the NFL’s ultimate capitalist who is also the beholder of a beautiful mind and some incredibly fortuitous luck? Cousins is like the man who plucked GameStop before the surge and dumped it just as Robinhood was deleting the buy button. Cousins is the man who nabbed his pension and retired just before the Great Depression. The dude who converted to gold moments before Black Monday.
His four-year contract with the Atlanta Falcons is the third time Cousins has emerged on the market as its only sensible quarterbacking solution and completely strong-armed a desperate team into forking over most or all of it up front. In 2018, Cousins sat idly by and watched the New York Jets and Minnesota Vikings bid one another up to a three-year $84 million deal. Fleecing former Washington owner Dan Snyder on back-to-back franchise tags before that was simply Cousins’s entry point into doing the Lord’s work in the NFL: sticking it back to the owners that find a way to squeeze everyone else.
Want a take about Cousins’s fit with the Falcons? It will, assuredly, be fine. Just like Cousins’s tenure everywhere, he will complete passes at a high rate and distribute the ball to playmakers more efficiently than a combination of Desmond Ridder and Taylor Heinieke. The Falcons will win somewhere between eight and 12 games, luck depending, and get foiled within the first two rounds of the playoffs.
That’s not important. Not today, at least.
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This is the time of year to celebrate Cousins’s artistry … and his resolve. NFL owners use some of the most disgusting, psychologically twisted means by which to extract money from their players. Have you ever seen an NFL contract? Have you ever had one explained to you by an agent or a general manager? There are more holes in one of those documents than a trypophobic’s nightmare. Look out at the landscape and see players squeezed into pay cuts, forced to seek their own trades, dispatched to the league’s outer regions and demanded to perform at an otherworldly level again just to reap more than the veteran’s minimum. While none of you will shed tears for someone making seven figures, remember how difficult the means of obtaining the entirety of a paycheck. Remember that there is someone in every front office asking their henchman accountant if there’s a way to dip into that player’s retirement savings.
Cousins is great because, for a third time, an owner has had to squirm. An owner has had to bid like some yokel at a furniture auction. An owner has had to take his long-term budget and light it on fire, all for a player who, while great, has only been to the postseason three times as a starting quarterback since 2015, and who has never been past the divisional round.
That last line is dismissive of Cousins’s complete skill set, which, I believe, is still befitting of a top-10 quarterback. As we’ve seen with someone like Matthew Stafford, all it takes is the right supporting cast to transform the narrative on someone. Cousins is always highly productive and, in most seasons, does not throw a great deal of bone-breaking interceptions.
But I bring it up because that’s how owners think. When Woody Johnson imported Aaron Rodgers and switched his political affiliation to the I Listen to Many Podcasts party, he did so knowing that Rodgers has won MVPs and Super Bowls. When the Broncos traded all of their draft picks and cash in the safe for Russell Wilson, they did so at the very least knowing that Wilson, based on his prior successes and borderline MVP performances, could change the emotional trajectory of an offseason.
Cousins has made four Pro Bowls and is the only person I know to have the title “2015 NFL Completion Percentage Leader” under the awards section of his Wikipedia biography (along with a second-team All–Big Ten nod in ’11). The Falcons had to fork over a two-year cash flow of $90 million for that, which is higher than any quarterback contracts in the NFL save for Lamar Jackson and Deshaun Watson. Cousins simply made sure to be on the market just after Baker Mayfield signed, making him the last plausible option before the draft.
And, to me, to all of us, that makes him cool as hell. That makes him an artist. That makes him more interesting than any novel, more of a rock star than any guitarist. Long live the capitalist.