The Athletic’s Mike Sando has released his “quarterback tiers” annually for the last eight years. It’s not his ranking of the NFL’s starting signal-callers. Instead, he polls 50 executives and coaches to create his five tiers, Tier 1 being the highest. Last year, he surveyed:
- Six general managers
- Eight head coaches
- 10 evaluators
- 12 coordinators
- Six quarterback coaches
- And seven executives whose specialties include analytics, game management, and the salary cap.
Most of them came to the same conclusion. Cousins was the best Tier 3 quarterback. Fifteenth in a 32-team league, tucked between Matt Ryan and Jimmy Garoppolo. “If there’s ever a Tier 3 Hall of Fame, Cousins might get the first bust,” wrote Sando. “In the past six years Cousins was first in Tier 3 twice, second twice and fourth another time. He was also the final quarterback in Tier 2 one year. His average vote this year (2.72) is within a hundredth of where he stood twice previously.”
Well, Cousins busted out of the Tier 3 Hall of Fame this year. Kinda.
Cousins climbed to Tier 2 for the second time in eight appearances. The last time was entering 2017 when he was coming off a Pro Bowl season in Washington. He threw for 4,093 yards and 27 touchdowns on the franchise tag that year and cashed in. The Minnesota Vikings gave him a fully guaranteed $84 million contract in 2018, and suddenly the pressure was on. He was no longer the guy drafted to be Robert Griffin III’s backup, overachieving for an underachieving franchise. Cousins was supposed to turn a team that had made the NFC Championship into contenders.
In 2017, 26 of 50 voters placed him in Tier 2. It was a 50/50 split this year.
“People have him down in Tier 3 and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’” an exec told Sando.
But the guy is a riddle. He plays almost flawlessly in the second half in the biggest comeback in the history of the league (against Indianapolis), which almost no one can do, and then one month later, in the playoffs, he’s got fourth-and-eight on the last play of the game and he’s hitting the checkdown five yards short of the sticks with the defender all over the receiver.
Sando’s evaluation is objective to the extent that something like this can be, but it’s subjective in that it’s opinion-based. Still, we can’t evaluate Cousins on numbers alone. We have to factor in his role in the comeback against the Buffalo Bills but also his 12 for 23, 105-yard performance the following week in primetime against Dallas. He led the Vikings to a 13-4 record last year but was a .500 quarterback before that. Many national pundits compare him to Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys’ scrutinized quarterback.
“I’m looking at him in comparison to Dak,” The Ringer’s Ryen Russillo told Sando on a recent podcast. “Because Dak, as you pointed out here, was ninth. I know who Kirk Cousins is. I feel like I’ve known who he was for a long time. The best way I can describe Kirk is I know what he won’t be, right?”
Russillo’s sentiment on Cousins is similar to many people in the national media.
I know his floor is really good. He’s gonna put up some numbers. And if you haven’t had an answer, if you’ve been going through vets – if you’ve been Colts-ing it – the last few years, you would love to have a Kirk Cousins.
A lot of the quarterback decisions are almost like relationships. What have you been going through the last few years? Okay, well, you know Kirk comes in; he’s steady. We know we’ve got a guy, we’re fine. But there’s a ceiling there that’s not gonna be much fun at times. And we saw that again in the playoffs for him.
The reason I compare him to Dak is they’re in the same grouping. And there’s gonna be some nice numbers. But I’ve had the hardest time with Dak Prescott. My own personal, who do I really think he is?
Vikings fans have suffered heartbreak before. Daunte Culpepper, Teddy Bridgewater, and Sam Bradford got hurt. Christian Ponder and Tarvaris Jackson didn’t pan out. Brett Favre had one good year and was awful the next. Randall Cunningham was in his mid-30s. They gave up on Brad Johnson too early. Cousins has offered Minnesota the most stability since Fran Tarkenton. But unlike the transcendent Tarkenton, who scrambled and made something out of nothing, Cousins is a product of his surroundings. Devastatingly conservative. Dak Prescott with less flair.
Sando says there are years where he’s thought Prescott should be Tier 1. One voter believed he was a Tier 3 quarterback this year. Cousins was comfortably Tier 3, occasionally Tier 2.
There’s not a huge difference between Dak Prescott and Kirk Cousins. We’ve always liked, and people have liked the makeup of Dak Prescott. I think people have perceived Prescott to be a better leader. Perceived him, certainly at times, to be more mobile, more able to handle it when the rush gets in his face.
That’s the knock on Cousins is he’s sort of dead to rights when there’s someone coming in to get him, and he might on fourth-and-8, on the last play of the playoff game, throw a completion underneath for a four-yard gain. That’s what he did in the last game last year. Where I think we feel Dak Prescott might, I don’t know, take a little bit more of a chance, be a little bit more of aggressive. Be a little bit more resourceful.
But, end of the day, they’re probably a lot more alike than we’ve wanted to think.
Prescott experiences more scrutiny because he plays for a nationally relevant franchise that gets a daily segment on First Take. But Cousins suffers more intimate scrutiny. The Vikings have one of the NFL’s most loyal, tormented fanbases. Like many players before him, he bears the brunt of fans’ anxiety – their baggage. But something has changed this off-season.
Maybe it’s the Netflix bump. Perhaps it’s that Cousins is in a contract year. It could be that he’s asserting himself as a leader. Regardless of what it is, people are higher on him, even though his stats declined last season. Cousins threw for an average of 4,029.7 yards and 31.3 touchdowns (a 105 average quarterback rating) from 2019 to 2021. Last year, he threw for 4547 yards and 29 touchdowns (92.5 QBR), despite playing in one more game last season.
But it’s never been about the stats for Cousins; it’s about our perception of him. He’s not clutch and unwilling to take a risk. He’s not a dynamic leader. Cousins is steady but doesn’t drive winning. He’ll throw for 4,000 yards but win as many games as he loses.
Last year, he said he was swimming in Kevin O’Connell’s offense. But he enters his second season with O’Connell and has shown signs of mastery in camp, according to offensive coordinator Wes Phillips.
Sometimes when you’re day-in and day-out in camp, some things go well, some things don’t go well. Maybe you’re not feeling so good walking off the field. But I did have a chance to look back at last year’s training camp at this time, and I felt a lot better about where we were. And I know Kirk feels the same way.
There’s so many little details and nuances to an offense, to a system. Things that aren’t listed in a playbook, you just can’t read until those things kinda happen. And he’s been able to experience a year of this offense, and then the offseason being here was also big. We’re still trying to evolve, but Kirk’s kinda leading the charge there.
Cousins doesn’t get up in the morning wondering what he can do to be a Tier 2 quarterback. He didn’t “put his body back together” every Monday, hoping 50 anonymous executives and coaches would see him differently in August. He says he wants to play in Minnesota until he retires. Cousins wants Vikings fans to be on his side. And he knows the only way to do that is to win.
Minnesota’s first preseason game isn’t until Thursday, and the regular season doesn’t start until Sep. 10. The last pass Cousins threw was short of the sticks on fourth-and-eight. He led dramatic comebacks in Buffalo and against Indianapolis last year but played worse statistically. He acted sort of like a regular guy in Quarterback, but he also got his brain scanned with his wife and quoted Margaret Thatcher. Yet somehow, Cousins became more popular. Fitting for the NFL’s most enigmatic QB.
