What Makes Kirk Cousins Great?

Stats and wins are an indicator, but not the whole story.

More of my football takes can be found on the Tim Anderson Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean. I also periodically appear on the Fan Speak North podcast to talk about Minnesota sports.

I want to preface this by saying that I cheer for the Vikings every Sunday. I love the Vikings with my whole soul. I want Kirk Cousins to succeed because I want the Vikings to succeed, and I want to see a great quarterback wearing my favorite team’s jersey. Kirk’s the closest thing we’ve had to that idea since I watched Brett Favre take the Vikings to their apogee in my lifetime, before turning into an Icarian cinder crashing back to earth. I watch every week, hoping Kirk Cousins can step into a role like that and make this team more than the parts we see on paper.

“On paper” is a bit of a theme for the Vikings.

Kirk is a great quarterback, on paper. His numbers look great, on paper. The team around him should be good, on paper. The Vikings should win a bunch of games and take a deep playoff run, on paper. The expectations should be really, really high… on paper.

And yet, here we are. The Vikings have all of the pieces to be successful. They have a coach who, ostensibly, has shown the ability to put a team, and a defense, together. They have attempted to address the problems facing the team, like the offensive line and the secondary. The things the team has done to get better should be enough to put them over the top.

But the one thing I keep coming back to is that the Minnesota Vikings are missing something. It’s not a personnel issue, it’s not a problem of cap space or coaching. It’s certainly not an issue of talent or investment in talent. It’s not an issue of development, as even though the offensive line development seems to be lacking, the Vikings have shown the ability to develop other positions into actually very strong players all over the field. Mike Zimmer has done a good job of building young secondary players, the defensive line has had some of the more memorable developments over the last 10 years. The wide receiver room has produced multiple superstars and solid players, and the team always seems to have solid tight ends and running backs.

So if the team has drafted at least at league average, the cap has not been a major issue, development at most positions is solid, and coaching has been (statistically) some of the best that Minnesota has seen since Dennis Green, what could the problem be?

The problem is that this team has no heart. There are no leaders on the field. The Minnesota Vikings are a collection of parts. A group of very talented players, coached by a solid coaching staff, with nothing bringing them together and pushing them to be better than they are on their own. And this is where the problem of Kirk Cousins begins for me.

Kirk Cousins has the statistics to be a top-10 quarterback. He has the football IQ to be a top-10 quarterback. He has every tool and can make every throw to be elite. But at the end of the day, Kirk Cousins has not demonstrated the consistency, or the leadership, or the creativity requisite of a great quarterback in the NFL. It’s part of what makes him so difficult to criticize. As much as Vikings fans want to say Kirk “silences the doubters” with great performances, there’s always something about his performance that leaves fans wanting more. Even in a great performance, there is something that is lacking with Kirk Cousins’ game.

Let’s talk for just a minute about what makes a quarterback great. It’s not statistics. Statistics are often the result of greatness, but they’re not the sole indicator. Wins can be deceiving by themselves when used to measure a quarterback. There’s also the admittedly subjective “eye test.”

When you talk about great quarterbacks, do you immediately jump to statistics? When we talk about Peyton Manning, do we discuss how many touchdowns he threw, or do we talk about “Omaha” and the complete command of the field that he had in a given moment and the knowledge of the game that was completely unparalleled? When we talk about Joe Montana, do we talk about how many passing yards he had, or do we talk about his ability to close out a game and play huge in the most clutch situations a player can be put in? When we talk about Brett Favre, do we talk about his quarterback wins, or do we talk about his total fearlessness as a gunslinger and his ironman streak that will likely never be broken?

From all of those guys, to Tom Brady, to Patrick Mahomes, to Russell Wilson, to Aaron Rodgers, we talk about their ability to seemingly turn it on and completely take over the game. We talk about their ability to elevate their teammates into who they need their teammates to be to elevate themselves. The greatest quarterbacks of our time see and play the game as something larger than themselves, and rise up to meet that idea time and time and time again. It’s not a single play, or a single drive, or a single game, or a single season. The best, the ones who we’re going to remember for generations of fans, don’t have to make excuses or be defended because their play passes that eye test of intangibles. Statistics are how we talk about and often compare active quarterbacks, but there are players who you don’t need to talk about statistics. Greatness, excellence, transcends the stat sheet and becomes apparent on the field.

And it’s in this space where Kirk Cousins fails. Minnesota needs a quarterback, a leader, who can be more than a single player on a team of 11. Minnesota needs someone who can command the field, someone who can be totally fearless, a player who becomes a superhuman in the clutch. Cousins doesn’t need to be all of these things, but he needs to be any of these things consistently. Kirk Cousins is the type of player who is good at a lot of these things, but he’s not the best at any of them, and in an NFL that defines “elite” in the increments of nuanced skills that become the legacy of a player, “really good” isn’t enough to cut it at the most important position in the game. We’re left with a question: what can Kirk Cousins do that no other quarterback can do? What sets Cousins apart when we’re talking about the great QBs of the league?

The truly difficult thing for many fans to parse is that greatness doesn’t live in vast differences. There is not a huge chasm between Cousins and Rodgers, Brady, Wilson, Mahomes, and the greats of years passed. We’re splitting the molecules of some of the greatest athletes in the world, but it’s in those small, nuanced differences that championships are won and lost. Similarly difficult for these fans is the fact that saying these things does not mean I hate Kirk Cousins. Like I said at the beginning, it’s the opposite. He’s the starting quarterback for my favorite football team. I want nothing but success and greatness from Kirk Cousins, and I hope to see it every time he takes the field.

What is perhaps most frustrating about this conversation is that Cousins shows so many flashes of potential to be that great quarterback. So many plays, great throws, breathtakingly efficient drives, hope-sustaining games, and stand-out clutch moments that make you think that maybe he’s found it. The “you like that” game, the playoff game against the Saints, the 2018 throw to Adam Thielen against Green Bay to tie the game that took absolute titanium balls to even attempt, let alone complete… Kirk has it in him. But for every moment of “fuck yeah, Kirk,” there’s three plays, drives, games, where Kirk just withers and inexplicably loses that “it” factor. His superhuman ability to put a football on a laser-precision line and thread the needle between an ungodly amount of defenders to somehow find his guy just seems to disappear at times, and he seems to only feel the pressure coming at him. It’s incredibly hard to predict which Kirk will show up, and that inconsistency is why it’s so hard to place Kirk in the “great” column of NFL QBs. When he’s on, Kirk is a top-5 QB in the NFL. When he’s not, he’s the 4th round pick who should have been sitting behind Robert Griffin III. When he’s on, there isn’t a team that can beat Minnesota. When he’s playing scared, Minnesota can only hope that someone else steps up.

And it’s in that last point that really demonstrates that major problem with the team as a whole. In the modern NFL, when your quarterback is just another player, there is no “next level” for your team. There’s no other position that can elevate themselves to the same level to push your team to a championship. A running back can win you a game, a wide receiver group can get you to a conference championship, a whole defense can bring you a title, but no single position can win you a Super Bowl other than a quarterback. Sometimes a quarterback isn’t enough, but a quarterback is the only position capable of carrying a team all the way to a championship. The problem with the Vikings is that they’re talented enough to compete, they’re well-coached enough to win a division and playoff games, but they don’t have a quarterback at this point who can consistently enough extract more out of his teammates and himself to become a Super Bowl champion.

We, as fans, feel that on gameday. If Kirk Cousins was that quarterback, if he was a player who could step up in the moments his team absolutely needed him most, the Vikings wouldn’t be out of any game and it would never feel like a game was out of hand when the team got down. If he were that quarterback, he would recognize fronts and check into more effective plays at the line of scrimmage and the team would trust him to do that. If Kirk were that quarterback, he would more consistently stop the team from spiraling into the abyss of some of the worst moments of his Vikings tenure. That’s what elite quarterbacks do. They stabilize teams that are in free fall, they elevate teams that are competing, and they elevate the players around them to attain heights that their team’s fans will remember and talk about for the rest of their lives.

Kirk Cousins can be a great quarterback if he can find another level. He can be the quarterback that Minnesota needs and that fans want to believe he is right now, but the fact of the matter is that while Kirk Cousins is a good quarterback with top-10 numbers, he’s just a stat line. I want him to be more than that, we need him to be more than that, and the Vikings need him to be more than that. Championships aren’t won on the stat sheet. There’s no award given for having the biggest numbers if those numbers don’t translate into consistently elevated play. If Kirk Cousins is going to take Minnesota where they are built to go, he needs to find that next level.

I’m cheering for him to find it soon.