NFL Open Thread: The Kurt Cousins Paradox edition
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His season being over — and it must be said he was having a pretty good year — is an occasion to reflect on the Cousins dilemma:
The Vikings and Cousins actually improved after All-Pro receiver Justin Jefferson suffered an injury in Week 5 because Cousins acts as central tendency’s anchor. Surround him with great teammates and he’ll hold them back. Surround him with rookies and scrubs and he’ll keep them afloat. Surrounding him with Super Bowl-caliber talent is impossible because his salary eats up too much cap space.
Cousins was also receiving some halfhearted MVP chatter before the injury, mostly because all the well-respected quarterbacks are having inconsistent years. Temporarily embracing and then summarily rejecting Cousins is an annual autumn ritual, like sampling a pumpkin spice beer and remembering that it tastes like licking nutmeg off a dormitory floor.
Tough, but fair.
Some other franchise will heed that siren song and sign Cousins in 2024, aging tendons and all, for too much money for too long a duration to provide stability, which is always a poor surrogate for excellence. Post-injury Cousins in Las Vegas or Atlanta, however, will never be quite the same as peakless peak Cousins in Minnesota: the fierce-but-not-too-fierce competitor, the winner in the strictest sense of the word, the Apotheosis of Equilibrium, the Sultan of Mid.
No one can replace Cousins as the ultimate exemplar of median-caliber quarterback play. Justin Herbert is too impressive, Dak Prescott too “Cowboys,” Derek Carr too late in his career and too much of a Cousins Lite. The Mac Jones types we often compare to Cousins usually fall far short of Cousins-ness, a reminder that it takes an extraordinary quarterback to appear so ordinary for so long. In the land of Jordan Love, Desmond Ridder, Sam Howell and Mac/Daniel Jones, the quarterback who can identify a blitz, check out of a bad play and find his secondary receiver is a king who can reign for a decade.
Few quarterbacks spark an argument as reliably as Cousins does. It’s always the same argument — is good enough really good enough? — and the core of the debate strikes at the philosophical core of the fan experience.
Cousins isn’t a bad player — that would be an easy problem. He’s both not really championship quality and hard to replace with a better player, which is a much trickier one.