Former Vikings brass doesn’t seem to think Cousins is “a winner”…but is Kirk turning over a new leaf already?
AJ Mansour
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So it’s the offseason in the NFL, and the period between the end of the NFL Draft and the beginning of Training Camp might be the single most dead news time of the entire calendar year when it comes to football. So, we the media, hit the streets looking for interesting subject lines and stories to write. Sometimes we read between the lines a little and sometimes we don’t…I’d argue that this story that popped up is the latter, and apparently I’m not alone in the thought.
Former Vikings executive George Paton is now the General Manager for the Denver Broncos. Yes those same Broncos that just recently acquired Russel Wilson via trade. Paton is convinced that he’s got a “winning quarterback” in Denver with Wilson now under center, and he claimed he learned what a winning quarterback looked like during his time in Minnesota with the Vikings…but it wasn’t Kirk that he referenced, instead it was Brett Favre’s arrival in 2009 that overshadowed a similar arrival for Cousins in 2018.
In an interview over the weekend with ProFootballTalk.com and Mike Florio, Paton explained this notion.
“There’s something different,” Paton explained. “I experienced that for one year, two years actually, when we got [Brett] Favre in Minnesota. I remember that first practice. Really, you knew it. It elevated everyone. And it didn’t just elevate the players. It elevated the people in the building, the work ethic, the accountability.”
The interview didn’t contain any reference to Kirk Cousins and a similar feel when he arrived a decade later and Florio made note of that in his post saying, “The fact that Paton didn’t experience that same feeling with the arrival of Kirk Cousins in 2018 is relevant to this conversation as well. Cousins is not a winner, at least not consistently and not in big games. And Paton, who was with the Vikings when Cousins arrived, apparently didn’t experience the same feeling when Cousins had his first practice in Minnesota.”
It’s long been a knock on Cousins that he can’t win the big games. He can put up the numbers and pad the stats, but when it comes to primetime games or the playoffs, he continuously falls flat.
Though there are many that will argue against this idea, here in Minnesota it’s sort of rung true. Despite looking like top-10 quarterback at times, the consistency and rising to the occasion has eluded Cousins.
Then there’s the idea of presence and leadership. Something that Paton claimed Favre had and Russel Wilson has, something that you feel when you walk into the room. We haven’t heard that from Cousins, but for one time this offseason.
There’s a story circulating this offseason of a team meeting that was held after the ownership made the decision to move on from Zimmer and Spielman. It was in this meeting where Kirk walked into the room and commanded the attention of everybody present. We’re talking teammates, owners and team officials who all reportedly saw a different side of Kirk on this day. There was an edge about him, a tenacity that had previously been tucked away.
Maybe he’s turning over a new leaf? Maybe the big personalities of the previous regime were preventing this side of him from surfacing. Or maybe it was just a one time thing?
We won’t know until the team takes the field this fall. What we do know, is that despite his success, however you view it, Kirk is running out of time here in Minnesota to prove that he can take the team to the next level. New GMs and new coaches don’t typically have a whole lot of patience with plateaued holdover from the previous front office. It’s now or never for Kirk to change this narrative and to prove Paton, Florio and all the naysayers wrong.
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