Kirk Cousins isn't always that bad in primetime. The stats say he's just really good at 1 p.m.
Yes, Kirk Cousins was hot garbage vs. the Eagles on Monday Night Football. That doesn't mean automatically fade him in primetime.
Kirk Cousins played terrible football on Monday night. It all fed into one overarching narrative; he can’t get it done under the spotlight of a primetime broadcast.
Cousins flailed as his Minnesota Vikings wasted the momentum of a convincing Week 1 win over the Green Bay Packers in a 24-7 Monday Night Football loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. He threw three interceptions, all in the second half and all inside the Eagles’ 30-yard line. He needed 49 dropbacks to gain a net 202 yards. He created a world where Philadelphia didn’t score a single point after halftime and still won comfortably.
This is all very bad; his worst prime time showing in 11 years as an NFL quarterback, in fact.
But dismissing Cousins as some kind of fast food hamburger that shrivels under the heat lamps of a nationally broadcast night game actually doesn’t hold up. In fact, before Week 2, primetime Kirk was statistically better than 4 p.m. kickoff Kirk. Both versions lagged significantly behind early-game Kirk:
numbers via Stathead
It makes sense the quarterback with the most dad energy in the world thrives in the games he has to wake up the earliest for. Of course, he’s also much more likely to have a throwaway game against, say, the Detroit Lions than a division-deciding December matchup at Lambeau Field in that time slot. Even so, his primetime numbers, while not otherworldly, are perfectly average.
Between 2014 and 2021, 22 NFL quarterbacks threw at least 400 passes in games that kicked off at 7 p.m. or later. Cousins’ passer rating of 95.9 ranks ninth; 0.3 points higher than Matthew Stafford, 3.9 points better than Tom Brady and 14.3 points ahead of Philip Rivers.
numbers via Stathead.
Sort that list by other efficiency metrics — yards per attempt, net yards per pass, etc — and Cousins ranks anywhere between seventh and 11th. Again, mostly fine!
On the other hand, his teams are 10-19 in games that kick off after 7 p.m. ET. While that record improves to 6-9 as a Minnesota Viking, it’s still not good. He’s 2-10 on Monday night in his NFL career and has a passer rating 13 points below his career average in those games.
Last night, with the chance to make a statement about his offense in his first primetime game without Mike Zimmer as head coach, he did stuff like this:
There’s no doubt this was awful. Cousins’ 51.1 passer rating and 2.3 adjusted yards per attempt were both the worst primetime numbers of his career.
But it’s not representative of his career as a whole. I can’t believe I wound up here defending Kirk Cousins, a human-sized bread bowl of clam chowder whose sponsorship deal with Pizza Ranch is a nexus where bland meets bland, but selling on the Vikings’ 2022 NFC title game or even Super Bowl hopes is shortsighted. History suggests he’ll snap back to the mean, where he’s roughly as good as other quarterbacks who’ve been at the center of sustained playoff runs (Stafford, Ryan, Manning).
Will he find an extra gear in the postseason to erase the memory of the worst nationally broadcast game of his career? It doesn’t feel likely, but the data suggests it’s no lock to bet against him based on one awful performance in Philadelphia. As long as he’s not playing on a Monday night, he might be perfectly average.