For all things that made Thursday such a gravy-balloon fight—Pete Alonso’s heroics, Terry Francona’s refusal to stay retired, the one person who didn't vote for Caitlin Clark as WNBA Rookie of the Year and their savvy choice to stay anonymous, Antonio Pierce’s suspension in exile by the NCAA—nothing beat this:
Well, OK. Alonso beat it by virtue of deed, because ninth-inning playoff homers beat the trousers off Week 5 anything. But the idea of Kirk Cousins reprising his previous moment of awkward virality eight years later with a celebration much more visually jarring probably stole the night for casual trainwreck enthusiasts. Part of that is just the result of the dog-standing-on-its-hind-legs aspect of Kirk Cousins doing something even medium spicy, but also it was so far out of his career context. We’d bet he never did this for any of the $409 million of contracts he signed between then and now.
No, Cousins's career has been noteworthy mostly for his unerring eye in maximizing his earnings with both his timing and the scarcity at the position. Nobody thought much of him or his Atlanta Falcons—as a general rule, one does not “think of the Atlanta Falcons”—as they and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers played paywall football on Thursday night. Nor should they have. It's the NFC South, and the four planets therein orbit a sun of white-hot flare-spitting suck. If you had fantasy players on either team, you were going to finish seventh in your pool no matter what you did.
So it was interesting but not shocking that Cousins was having one of his occasional heaters Thursday night—34-for-46 with 385 yards and three tuddies in a game the Falcons had been losing since halftime. With two minutes left, Cousins could maybe steal a win, but that wouldn't be memorable. Those were nice numbers, sure, but he'd done numbers like that before. You don’t remember any of those games, do you?
And then, as Cousins stood on the sideline at the two-minute warning pretending to pay attention to head coach Raheem Morris and offensive coordinator Zac Robinson, he decided, "No, this isn't the time for prudence, or smart chain-moving. This is the moment for my career retrospective."
What followed was Kirk Cousins's football life compressed into 186 seconds, starting with the surest bet of all: him leading Darnell Mooney too much of a fourth-and-15 from the Falcons' 20 and hitting Bucs linebacker Lavonte David right in the numbers. Just another game-killer from the most regressed-to-the-mean quarterback in the game, yes?
No! Tampa had four plays from the Atlanta 28, promptly managed to back themselves out of field-goal range—we told you, it's the NFC South—and punted into the end zone to make Cousins cover half a field in 1:14. Which of course he did, because for Cousins, no bad deed goes unatoned for, just as surely as no good deed goes unpunished. Cousins ran an exemplary nine-play drive that included two tactical spikes, the second with one second left. Because the Falcons are the Falcons, they then incurred a delay of game penalty, making the game-tying field goal attempt by Younghoe Koo into a 52-yarder. Koo has a formidable leg, but it had already betrayed him twice, from 41 and 54 yards (that one was blocked, to be fair).
So of course Koo makes it, and of course the Falcons win the toss in overtime, allowing Cousins to prove, as he had already done with both the pick and the game-tying drive, that he can beat you and himself in so many ways.
This time, it was the other guys. Two short throws to the right to Drake London, Cousins’s new version of Terry McLaurin; when London got hurt on the second one, Cousins tossed a 45-yard dart-and-go to KhaDarel Hodge for the game-winning score. It all took only 66 seconds. Falcons 36, Bucs 30, and how about that, Pete Alonso?
Cousins's final numbers were career highs in completions (42), attempts (58), yards (509) and touchdown passes (four); the win moved his career win-loss record (the most meaningless statistic in all of sports) to a whopping 79-69-2, which averages out to a 9-8 record. That's kind of Kirk Cousins in a nutshell—good enough to get right onto the verge of the postseason, and Kirk Cousins-y enough to just kind of hang out there for a decade. It's also the Falcons in a nutshell, only less verge-of-the-postseason-y. While we're at it, the NFC South in a nutshell, too. If you have a nut allergy, this might be why.
But numbers will not tell the Kirk Cousins story quite like this or this. He knows how to monetize being unsettlingly goofy in a way matched in the sport only by Philip Rivers—very different vibrational frequency, but roughly as odd on the merits. But for a comp that makes more sense when it comes to gormless goofiness, strange intensity, and bouts of unpredictable virtuosity the real match is Adam Sandler, who has a similar net worth. Maybe that's the way to look at this in the end—Adam Sandler beat the Bucs on Thursday Night Football. If you’re going to steal a Thursday night, you might as well be weird about it.
