Kirk Cousins will likely stay put, with one obvious potential exception
Quarterback Kirk Cousins will stay with the Vikings for the rest of the year. Unless he doesn't.
That's the bottom line of the Saturday night Sunday Splash! report from ESPN regarding the possibility that Cousins will be traded. And it meshes with our own take on the situation, which was driven by the rare (for me) application of common sense.
Of course, most of the takes and arguments and other comments in recent days regarding a Cousins trade have ignored said common sense.
Cousins, who has a no-trade clause, has no reason to waive it. And, currently, the Vikings have no team for which it could be waived.
Three weekends of football remain before the window closes on 2023 trades. A lot can happen between now and then. And if, as the new report acknowledges (and as we suggested), a starting quarterback on a short-list contender suffers a serious injury, the planets could align in a way that gets Cousins to embrace having his life turned upside down for the balance of a season that currently requires him to check 12 more boxes before becoming an unrestricted free agent, again, and getting paid a crapload of money. Again.
Rewind to 2011. Carson Palmer had basically quit on the Bengals. The Bengals were content to let him sit on his couch. Then, two days before the trade deadline, Raiders quarterback Jason Campbell suffered a broken collarbone. By Tuesday, Palmer was traded to the Raiders.
The question for any contender that would lose its starter becomes whether it would opt to elevate the backup over giving up whatever it would take to bring Cousins to town and get him up to speed in a new offense with a new coaching staff and new teammates in a new city — even if he took a new approach to refusing to do any football work on Tuesdays.
We won't name names or teams in order to avoid being accused of conjuring a jinx. Regardless, even if a starting quarterback on a contending team gets injured for the balance of the season, it's hard to imagine a team wanting to trade for Cousins, the Vikings willingly parting with their best option at the position, and Cousins voluntarily throwing a wrench into a currently clear path to his latest giant bag of cash in March.
