Kirk Cousins Was Not Out for Revenge

The QB on why he considers himself lucky to have landed in Washington, and the difference between this year’s Vikings and last.

Kirk Cousins left FedExField, a dramatic 20–17 win over the Commanders in tow, with a section of fans chanting the line—“You Like That?!”—he made famous playing in D.C. On his way out, he made a point of seeking out punter Tress Way, one of three former Washington teammates of his left on that roster, as well as former teammate and current Washington assistant Ryan Kerrigan, strength coach Chad Englehart and dietician Jake Sankal.

Then he retreated through the tunnel back to the Vikings’ locker room. He’d get his moments of exultation there, too. His teammates repeated the “You Like That” chant for him, and video of a shirtless Cousins wearing (I think) someone else’s bling on the team plane wound up going viral. Minnesota is now 7–1, so it’s not difficult to comprehend the reason for his excitement.

But there was one thing that was missing, to hear Cousins tell the story. That would be any hint of anger toward the place, or edge sharpened off how they let him go in 2018, or satisfaction in throwing it back in anyone’s face. A revenge game, this was not. Or at least Cousins swears it wasn’t.

Cousins was all smiles on his way off FedEx Field :: Julio Cortez/AP

“Mike Shanahan drafted me, and at the time, it felt like a dead end going there, when they’d drafted a quarterback second overall,” Cousins said, via phone from FedExField. “I remember Kyle Shanahan telling me the day after I was drafted, ‘Our goal is to have you play well in preseason, and then we'll trade you.’ It felt like a dead end going there. Then to look back and realize that I probably wouldn't be where I am, talking to you, if I hadn't have gone there?

“To get coached by Mike and Kyle and Matt [LaFleur] and Sean [McVay] and Mike McDaniel and Jay Gruden, and to play with Jordan Reed and Pierre Garçon, DeSean Jackson, Vernon Davis, Brandon Scherff, all these guys, I’m just so grateful that I got to go there and grow with that system, play with those players. Very, very fortunate to end up there. A lot of careers can be ruined just simply by where you end up in the draft and who you’re coached by and the players you have around you. It was the opposite for me.”

So maybe it was fitting that Cousins’s first visit back since leaving for the Vikings in 2018 came with another guy who coached him there, Kevin O’Connell, in charge and a roster full of vets like the ones he played with in Washington.

Together, after erasing a 17–7 deficit in the fourth quarter, the one thing everyone could agree on was that the quarterback got his happy homecoming. Whether that was about looking ahead, or looking back, is still up for some debate. What’s not is how impressive the Vikings have been through eight games.

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We’re officially at the season’s midpoint, and that is hard to believe. Inside The MMQB column for Week 9, you’ll get …

• In Three Deep, a recap of Tom Brady’s latest, greatest fourth-quarter heroics from the guy who scored the game-winner, plus Jets CB Sauce Gardner and Lions DE Aidan Hutchinson.

• In Ten Takeaways, Tyreek Hill on Tua Tagovailoa and Mike McDaniel, Nick Sirianni on the togetherness of his unbeaten Eagles, Cameron Dicker: the itinerant kicker, and more.

• In a special midseason section, we have one wish for all 32 teams in the second half. 

• In Six From Saturday, what remains at Georgia on defense (it’s pretty good still), the star Tennessee receiver who the Bulldogs had to defend, and more Odds and Ends from the football weekend.

But we’re starting with a quarterback and the complicated relationship with his former city.

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The twist is how the Vikings got here, to 7–1, by making the kind of commitment to Cousins and his teammates that Washington never did.

O’Connell and his GM, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, arrived in January, and didn’t give much thought to the idea that a new regime should raze the place in the name of putting its own stamp on the operation. So the Vikings kept program guys like Harrison Smith, Eric Kendricks, Danielle Hunter and Adam Thielen. They made Justin Jefferson, Dalvin Cook and Christian Darrisaw their core. And they didn’t just hang on to Cousins; they extended him.

I can remember, at their camp in July (and before and since too), how O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah raved about what Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman left them. How the vets had a lot left. How Jefferson and Darrisaw could grow into the NFL’s best. How good the locker room was, and how solid the culture could be as a result of that. Of course, those players knew all that. So the new guys’ strategy wouldn’t surprise them.

“Not if you know football,” Cousins said. “I think it was pretty self-evident if you watch the tape that there were a lot of good football players here in the locker room, and the metrics bear that out from last year when you look at it and study it. It was pretty self-evident and it didn't take too long for them to know the group that they had. We just had to find the inches. That was the key.

“Last year, we struggled to find those inches. And this year, we’ve been able to find them. I think we’ve actually probably not played as well this year as we probably did last year through eight games, but we found the inches at the end, and that’s been the difference.”

Cousins is probably overstating it a little. But not much. Last year, the Vikings started 3–5, and the five losses came by a total of 18 points, with two ending in overtime. Over that time, there was just one two-possession game—a win over Seahawks in Week 3.

So how do you work on fixing something like that? One way is to simply learn from the situations after being in them over and over. Another is to drill the situations, as much as you possibly can without knowing exactly which of them will come up on a week-to-week basis.

“The experience of being there before always helps as a group,” Cousins said. “You were there last year to learn from those failures of coming up short. And then I do think our coaching staff does try to emphasize it every week, talking about situations in meetings and really trying to play the game before the game in terms of what can come up at the end of half, end of games. They try to prepare you for those moments.”

It sure looked like the Vikings were prepared for them Sunday.

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As Cousins said, the margins are thin in the NFL. That’s true even for a 7–1 team, one willing to admit that it isn’t as far off from last year’s 3–5 start as it may seem. This year’s version is probably better positioned to understand that and value the chances it has to win on those margins.

Of course it helps, on the game’s first series, to have Jefferson on hand, too, as Minnesota faced a second-and-7 from the 9. On the play, Cousins hung in the pocket and popped one to a spot in the corner of the end zone.

You simply can't cover Justin Jefferson 🤯

(via @NFL)pic.twitter.com/wP0ugYOxzh

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) November 6, 2022

“The defensive back, having to chase Justin to the back pylon, he doesn't have vision on my throw the way Justin does,” Cousins said. “So I know I can put that ball kind of in Justin’s general direction, and he can use his vision to come back to the ball and be strong with it. He’s proven that many times, and so I'm glad we kind of put that one up there to him because it was pretty well-defended overall.

“And that was probably our best bet, just give him that opportunity and he does a great job playing with vision and being able to react to a ball thrown a little behind him or a little bit off his body. He does a great job reacting.”

Jefferson went over the top of Commanders corner Benjamin St-Juste and made it 7–0, and that was it for the Vikings for a while. Their next four possessions ended in punts, with two going three and out. A promising drive to end the half was short-circuited with Cousins throwing another 50-50 ball to Jefferson, only this one was batted away by St-Juste and into the arms of safety Danny Johnson to keep the halftime score at 7–3.

The Commanders controlled the third quarter, outgaining the Vikings 151–13 over that frame, taking the lead with Taylor Heinicke’s 49-yard bomb (with some help from an official, who ran a de facto pick on a DB) to Curtis Samuel, and extending it to 17–7 on the second play of the fourth quarter.

“I just think that you understand when you play in this league, you just have to keep playing,” Cousins said. “And these games do tend to come down to the final drive, and so you know you just need to keep playing and trust that if you do that, you’ll hang around, you’ll stay in it, and somebody’s going to make a play and it’s not over until the clock says zero. So you just keep playing and trust that if you do that, you’re going to have a chance.”

The first big one for Cousins to get the Vikings back in the game came right after things looked darkest—the quarterback threw a pick that was nullified by a pass-interference call, then took an eight-yard sack that put Minnesota in second-and-18.

You can guess where Cousins went next. Jefferson for 11 and then, on third-and-7, a whole lot more, with the quarterback effectively digging out of a hole of his own creation.

“Jay Gruden used to always coach us by saying that every play is its own entity, and you have to just play each play for what it is and not be thinking about the previous play or the next play,” he said. “In that case, it was a third down, and they brought cover zero and we had a good route to Justin against zero. I just wanted to give him a ball and put it up. I knew I'd probably get hit and, again, you just played that play for it is.”

What it wound up being was a 47-yard gain, and the Vikings kicked a field goal four plays later to cut the Washington lead to 17–10. On the fifth play of the Commanders’ next possession, another member of the Minnesota old guard, Smith, picked Heinicke off at midfield and ran it back 35 yards to the Washington 12. Two plays after that, Cook ran a wheel route down the left sideline. It was a ball few quarterbacks would trust a tailback to get—especially since the play just went in for Sunday’s game—but it was a result of Cousins’s trust in Cook that’s been built up over years of reps.

“It was a great design by our coaches to create that play and give Dalvin that route,” Cousins said. “And he did a great job learning the play later this week and then mastering it so he ran it correctly. And then making the play, keeping his feet inbounds, holding on in traffic … it’s a big-time play in the game. Probably my favorite memory from this game was that throw to Dalvin.

“There's a high level of difficulty to it, and I feel proud of the way Dalvin made that play.”

Cousins trusted Cook on the game-tying touchdown :: Julio Cortez/AP

The defense then forced a three-and-out. A worn-down Commanders defense came back out, and the Vikings controlled the rest—mastering another situation in taking 15 plays to cover 44 yards and grind six minutes off the clock, setting Greg Joseph up for the game-winner with just 16 seconds left.

“I think the ability to use clock, make them use timeouts and try to be smart with how we manage the game, a lot of that comes from coaches telling us what the plan is and we got to execute it,” Cousins said. “I don’t think that this end of game was too complicated but just something you understand can make a difference in winning or losing. It’s just mastering those situations and handling them right.”

Which, as these guys see it, is the difference between 3–5 and 7–1 halfway through the year.

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On the 47-yarder to Jefferson, Cousins, as he expected to, got cracked by Daron Payne, getting the wind knocked out of him—backup Nick Mullens came on to take the next snap. Cousins played it off afterward, reiterating that the defensive look told him he’d probably have to take a whack to get the ball downfield and that “I couldn't really breathe for a little bit, so just needed to get that back before I could call the next play.”

Obviously, he wound up being fine, and it wound up being another footnote for a team and a quarterback that keep turning those key moments into footnotes—be it knowing when to take a chance and trust a Cook or a Jefferson, or be it compartmentalizing rough stretches, or be it methodically taking the clock all the way before setting up a game-winning field goal.

Cousins believes he’s winning on these things, thanks in large part to the accumulation of his experiences and the way the new staff is emphasizing those details, too. Which brings us back to where O’Connell came from, before going to the Rams and then the Vikings, which is the same place Cousins came up. As we talked, on two occasions, Cousins rattled off the names of the Shanahans, McVay, LaFleur and McDaniel, in explaining why he lacked the vengeance a lot of other players would carry into a new home.

In fact, in a lot of ways, as he saw it, the way he won the game in Washington was a result of his time there, the lessons he took from it, and the synergy he and O’Connell now have that’s born on their philosophies aligning.

“I mean, I can go on and on,” he said. “I’m just grateful I got to be a part of what we were doing there and to have those six years form the foundation of my career. … My career was really springboarded because I got to go to Washington and be around the players and coaches I was around. And I just have an amount of gratitude that's difficult to put into words, that I got to go there.”

That’s why there weren’t glares at the crowd or the owners box as Cousins left the field Sunday. Sure, he departed having made a point. But more than anything, he wanted it to be one of appreciation for what Washington meant to his career, with the brief chance to look back at all of that. And even better, at the end of this one, is all he and the Vikings have to look forward to.