Cousins plans to play for many more seasons
Joe Johnson
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With the glut of news coming out this training camp, in unorthodox ways thanks to COVID, sometimes a bug news take will fall through the cracks. One such story that I just came across two days after the source said as much comes courtesy of Chris Tomasson of the Pioneer Press and Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins.
Cousins, 31, spoke with the media last week via conference call and the topic of his plan for the future arose.
#Vikings Kirk Cousins “I do want to play this game for a long time & I know you can’t just wake up at 37 or 38 & start to have good habits You have to start much younger So I’ve tried to do that.. Hopefully it means I can play lot of snaps this season & for several years to come"
— Chris Tomasson (@christomasson) August 7, 2020
Now, Cousins isn’t wrong. What he may be alluding to is a Star Tribune story that came out during his first season in purple, in which it was reported that Cousins was one of many NFL players (like Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers) to adopt the “ageless” (at least until last season) Tom Brady’s unique dietary approach, known as the TB12 Method.
Brady has been so hardcore about this that it has been reported that his dietician basically lives in his guest house (although I like to think of Brady sharing bunk beds with Alex Guerrero).
Cousins does adhere to the main tenets, and cuts out products like wheat, dairy and eggs from his diet. Or at least he mostly does, outside of cheat days. I imagine Brady’s cheat days are the ones that he sleeps more than four hours.
In the December 2018 Strib article about this, Cousins says:
“A lot of what he’s doing, or what I’ve learned about what he’s doing, I had actually — with different people that I run into — saw the same messaging, in terms of what to eat, what not to eat, the importance of sleep, the importance of [soft] tissue work,”
For a man like Cousins, who is known to almost over prepare, it isn’t really a surprise that he would tap into the new era of athleticism where every aspect of your diet and year revolved around getting the most out of your body as possible.
“Everybody I was seeing was really reiterating the same things, so when you see it coming from one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, you see it coming from the people you work with, you say, ‘Maybe there’s something to this.’ I think it affirmed some of those approaches.”
When you think about it, this makes what players like Brett Favre or Babe Ruth so special as they were amazing without the diet, or in Ruth’s case, while smoking cigars and drinking enough champagne to kill a French elephant.
That doesn’t mean that Cousins always adhered to something this strict, as he explained in the article:
“[The rules] certainly were different than maybe what I was doing early in my college career, so there were some changes that needed to be made. But now, having gotten into my routine and being in Year 7 [of my career], I think I’ve gotten a good handle on what I want to do to take care of myself and prolong my career. I think there are a lot of similarities to what Tom’s doing. It’s no accident that he’s played as well as long as he has. It matters to him, and he’s been intentional about the process to be able to do that.”
Hopefully Cousins can also mimic Brady’s output as well as his longevity if only for one season. Should he be able to, he’ll go down as the biggest hero in Minnesota Vikings history and make the Minnesota sports Mount Rushmore alongside Kevin Garnett, Kirby Puckett, Randy Moss and Fran Tarkenton.