The man who franchise tagged Kirk Cousins twice now has a blunt take on him
The NFL’s “franchise tag,” where a player is paid the average of the top five salaries at his position while allowing the team to unilaterally impose contract terms and prevent that player from entering free agency, was originally conceived as a sort of Bird rule for the NFL to allow teams to re-sign their own players — the difference being that unlike the NBA, football still has to work within a hard salary cap.
It has more recently morphed into a great way to generate animosity between a team and a player, prolonging the inevitable when that player, playing for a year or two under a contract that’s by definition less than he thinks he’s worth (otherwise he’d simply sign an extension without the team having to use the tag on him), takes to the open market.
Carry this to its logical conclusion and you have what happened with former Redskins General Manager Scot McCloughan and quarterback Kirk Cousins.
McCloughan thought Cousins was worth keeping around; he did not think Cousins was worth paying the big-time money that Matt Stafford and Derek Carr pulled down as the league’s highest-paid signal callers.
And as McCloughan told KKFN-FM in Denver on Friday, he thinks that teams should be loath to consider the idea of paying Cousins any more than that in free agency.
“He’s a good player,” McCloughan said on the “Pritchard & Cecil” show. “Is he special? I don’t see special.”
McCloughan then issued a damning indictment of Cousins’ abilities to play the role of the quarterback in a modern, pass-happy NFL offense, saying, “You just need to have some talent around him, because you don’t want him to be throwing the ball 35 to 40 times to win the game.”
Cousins attempted 33.6 passes per game, 16th in the league. Carson Palmer and Eli Manning, at 38.1 apiece, led the league, and the list of starters with at least 35 attempts per game includes those two plus, in order, Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady, Philip Rivers and Matthew Stafford, Mike Glennon and Patrick Mahomes.
So some guys throw the ball more than others.
On the one hand, Manning threw it a ton because his team was often down by a mile and needed to use as little clock as possible to try and get back in the game.
On the other hand, guys like Roethlisberger and Brady ran elite offenses, compiling the top two records in the AFC and frequently putting super-sized point totals on the board.
If we restrict this list to guys who played a full (or nearly full, like more than 12) slate of games, the rankings, in order, read Manning, Roethlisberger, Brady, Rivers, Stafford, Russell Wilson, Derek Carr, Joe Flacco and Jameis Winston ahead of Cousins, who rises to 10th in attempts per game.
Rank those guys 1-10 in terms of their teams’ record, and Cousins ends up seventh; Carr’s Raiders were 6-10, Winston’s Buccaneers were 5-11 and Manning’s Giants went 3-13, with no particularly statistically meaningful effect from the backups (the Raiders and Giants went 0-1 with their backups; Tampa Bay went 2-1 with Ryan Fitzpatrick at the helm).
Of the six guys ahead of Cousins, only two, Roethlisberger and Brady, made the playoffs.
So, in essence, the proper response to McCloughan’s assertion that Cousins shouldn’t be throwing the ball 35 or more times a game is, “So what? Only two guys made the playoffs doing that.”
Which, in turn, casts Cousins in a better light. After all, the Skins went 7-9. They did this despite a rushing offense that was 28th in the league and that averaged a paltry 3.6 yards per carry, a rushing defense that was the worst in all of football and a scoring defense that was 27th in the NFL.
Put another way, the fact that the Skins finished 12th in passing yards and ninth in passing touchdowns means Cousins was the main thing keeping them from having a much worse season than they in fact had.
The bigger question is whether this justifies the use of the franchise tag; put another way, the stats say Cousins is the equal of just about any other decent quarterback in the league, and his numbers hold up, especially in the context of just how wretched a team he was on last year.
Washington has until March 6 to decide if it wants to extend the franchise tag on Cousins, a move that would require him to be given a 20 percent salary increase over his already high $23.9 million. That would make him the highest-paid player in the league, pulling down $28.68 million, over a million bucks more than Stafford makes.
That’s a huge amount to commit to a guy, any guy, on a football team. Not for nothing do teams with the highest-paid quarterbacks tend to have salary cap and team depth problems; the downfall of the Seahawks, who went from back-to-back Super Bowl appearances and coming a miracle Malcolm Butler interception at the goal line away from a pair of championships to missing the playoffs entirely, speaks to that, as does Baltimore’s failure to make the playoffs with its cap money tied up in another Super Bowl guy who was a better value on a rookie contract.
With the deepest quarterback draft since 1983 on the horizon, now might be the time to free up millions of dollars for the offensive line or the defense rather than keeping on a good-but-not-great signal caller you’d have to pay a mint to.
McCloughan said of Cousins’ options as a free agent should the Skins refuse to pay that franchise money, “I can promise you this: He has done his homework, probably too much, about each roster, who his receivers are, who his backs are, who his O-linemen are, who the coach is. Not just the head coach, but the coordinator, position coach, the system they run. I promise you he has notebook after notebook for each team. He is very, very intellectual about knowing what’s best for him. He understands he’s getting older, he’s been in the league a little bit. He wants to win. I know that.
“Personally, knowing him, it’s not about the money. It’s about the right fit, where he knows he has stability, he has good coaches, he has good players and he has a chance to be successful. I don’t blame him. He’s put himself in that situation with what he’s done the last three years.”
So yes, Kirk Cousins is good. But to command the money he’s commanded in Washington the past couple of years, he’d have to be special, especially when so many teams in desperate need of a quarterback — the Browns and Jets especially, but possibly the Giants and a few others — might be better off drafting one rather than trying to throw big money at a guy who hasn’t won anything.
So, “Is he special? I don’t see special.” This could be an interesting offseason for Cousins as he tries to secure a contract befitting an elite guy.
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