Like staring into a new galaxy via telescope or examining a hotel bedspread via microscope, the Atlanta Falcons’ offense raises more questions the longer one stares. A quick, drive-by assessment might conclude that the Falcons’ quarterback is simply too rusty, too injured or too old to complete his tasks as assigned. After all, Kirk Cousins has not thrown a touchdown since Nov. 3 and now has six interceptions in his past two games.
That belief, I feel, would be incorrect (and is shared by Falcons coach Raheem Morris, who declared Cousins the starter moving forward, even after another statistically bad performance).
A deeper look shows a well-designed offense with some occasional bad actors missing assignments, not seeing choice routes the same way as Cousins or not interpreting well the kind of wordless communication that can make the razor-thin difference between a touchdown and a pick at this time of year. In that school of thought, the burden is more on offensive coordinator Zac Robinson.
I think that belief would be incorrect, too.
After the Falcons were blown out 42–21 by the Minnesota Vikings in Cousins’s return to Minneapolis, the utter absurdity of there being a quick fix in Atlanta was placed on center stage. Defensively, this secondary was in tatters and two glaring miscommunication errors led to the most wide-open touchdowns Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison have enjoyed in their lifetimes. Jefferson, on his 52-yard bomb from Sam Darnold, held his hand in the air calling for the football long enough to get a taxicab at rush hour. That, plus a critical and gutting fumble by the otherwise excellent Ray-Ray McCloud III on a kickoff return, were much more direct contributors to the loss than Cousins or the offense.
In short: The Falcons are now, somehow, one of the best pass-rushing teams in the NFL over the past two weeks and the worst pass-defending team. They are incredible with the ball in the hands of their running backs and terrifying with the ball in the hands of their quarterback. Big plays seem to be either mysteriously or glaringly erased by holding calls. Would a four-game losing streak—which has dropped them to 6–7—really be stanched by the insertion of a rookie passer? The answer is no.
Of course, when one pays $45 million per year for a quarterback and immediately drafts his successor (Michael Penix Jr.) in the first round, they must lie in the bed they have inevitably created. The box-score narrative on Cousins will be such that it forces the Falcons to spend the next week having conversations they do not wish to have publicly.
For the Cousins is not washed crowd: Cousins spent the past two weeks letting go of footballs that had an exit velocity akin to bubbles out of a toddler’s plastic wand. But before halftime Sunday, he overcame a pair of devastating holding calls that put Atlanta in two different first-and-20 situations, and still managed to hit a beautiful deep ball to Darnell Mooney on the same drive that set Atlanta up for points. Morris pulled the rug out from underneath the offense with some poor sequencing and sent the team into the half with a field goal, a 14–10 deficit and zero momentum.
Cousins also had a great ball to McCloud on Sunday in which he was facing a picket fence of Vikings defenders in his face and used his eyes to shift open a swath of empty space to hit McCloud with room to run. It was vintage Cousins.
This has been the theme of the Cousins-coaster, which has seen the quarterback start the year with 14 touchdowns and one interception on throws from a clean pocket and shift to a zero touchdowns and four interceptions in the games since. Even in last week’s four-interception performance against the Los Angeles Chargers, one of the picks was on a ball where Cousins saw his wide receiver curbing the route and turning back toward the football, but the receiver instead kept extending the route. Another pick had a wide receiver calling for the football in the end zone and then not going up and making an attempt to catch it when Cousins acquiesced.
Against the Vikings, the hard-to-fathom variance between faulty route and faulty quarterback was on display again. On Cousins’s first interception, the team appeared to be missing a route in the flat that would have sucked safety Josh Metellus up toward the line of scrimmage to create an opening. On his second, Kyle Pitts had a wide-open touchdown had Cousins simply thrown the ball to accentuate Pitts’s inside leverage—a throw we have seen Cousins make countless times without strain. However, Cousins botched this one, throwing it both outside and away—a pick so easy to make that Byron Murphy Jr. needed just one hand to secure it.
If you want to nitpick Cousins in particular, there was a highly controversial instance in this game where Drake London was awarded a catch on a simultaneous possession scenario. However, on replay, London didn’t even have one of his hands on the ball, signifying that Cousins may have thrown an additional pick. Minnesota’s pick-six artist, Andrew Van Ginkel, almost jumped a screen pass as well.
For the it’s-not-the-offense crowd: Juxtapose all the aforementioned confusion with the fact that Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier have been excellent on the ground, especially over the past two weeks against some of the more physical defensive teams on Atlanta’s schedule. Robinson, on his touchdown Sunday, had the largest gap I’ve seen a ballcarrier run through against Minnesota all season. Allgeier smashed into a Vikings defender, remained upright and rumbled for an additional 25 yards. The pair racked up 155 yards this week after 118 yards the week prior.
Despite them being clear weapons, Cousins did not target a receiver out of the backfield on Sunday at all. Period. Or a receiver who began the play in tight, which is the first time that has happened in the NextGenStats era. This could have either been an issue of Cousins not seeing these opportunities (he struggled to get some short-yardage passes to Bijan Robinson a week ago), an inability by Zac Robinson to dial them up, a reticence to dial them up given how aggressive and cerebral Minnesota’s front seven is … or some combination of everything.
And that’s the underlying stew that awaits Penix, which is probably why Morris is so reluctant to hurl him in just yet. If the argument was to sit Cousins for a week and allow him some rest to regain his fastball, it holds no water because, on certain downs, Cousins still has his fastball. If the argument was to bench Cousins permanently because he is the source of the team’s issues, it holds no water because three scores—the difference in this one—could be directly attributed to inexperience and, at times, incompetence in the secondary or special teams woes.
A four-game losing streak turns up the volume in moments such as these, especially in a situation like the one Atlanta is in. But with the streaking Tampa Bay Buccaneers having now edged ahead in the NFC South, and Atlanta still holding onto a statistically significant chance of reaching the playoffs, now is not the time to abandon the entirety of the plan and entrust the remainder of this season to an incredibly talented, yet unproven player.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Benching Kirk Cousins for Michael Penix Jr. Would Not Fix Falcons’ Issues.
