The relationship between Kirk Cousins and the Atlanta Falcons continues to get stranger by the week. Cousins signed a four-year, $180 million contract in the spring of 2024 but was benched late last season in favor of Michael Penix Jr. While it was clear Cousins wasn’t the future, the Falcons kept him throughout the offseason and have been using him as a $45 million backup this season.
Cousins may have seen some light at the end of the tunnel when he replaced a struggling Penix in last week’s 30-0 loss to the Carolina Panthers. But Raheem Morris turned the lights off twice, saying Cousins would not compete with Penix for the starting job and that Penix hasn’t lost the job after a bad game last week.
Stuck in his own prison, Cousins is waiting for a team to make a trade and rescue him. But his week got worse when The Athletic’s Dianna Russini reported on Saturday that the Falcons have no plans to trade Cousins as teams may look for quarterback help ahead of the Nov. 4 trade deadline.
“As for Kirk Cousins, he is sitting in Atlanta right now as the backup quarterback, and because of his no-trade clause, it’s not as simple as just shipping him somewhere,” Russini wrote. “He’d have to sign off, and that’s only going to happen if the situation is right.”
Falcons, Kirk Cousins Continue to Make Contract Situation Messier Entering Week 4
Russini’s notebook on the matter makes it seems like Cousins may be the force that is preventing a trade. Cousins has been very meticulous with his landing spots in the past and he may be looking for somewhere where a team wouldn’t do the same thing that Atlanta did, giving him the starting job, only to acquire a younger, cheaper starter to replace him.
There’s also the matter of Cousins’s contract, which Russini also cites as a reason the Falcons haven’t made a trade.
“Even then, the math isn’t easy,” Russini continued. “Any team thinking about taking a swing would need cap room and budget space to absorb what’s left of his $27.5 million base salary for 2025. They’d have to grove up a draft pick or two on top of that.”
While it seems like these are parameters that Cousins created with his hefty contract, the Falcons may have their reasons to keep him around. Although he threw for 298 yards and a touchdown in the season-opening loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Penix has thrown for 307 yards with a pair of interceptions in his last two games.
If Penix continues to struggle, it may be worth keeping Cousins around. But that could also put Morris and General Manager Terry Fontenot on the hot seat for a mismanagement of resources. Either way, the situation continues to be a distraction and it may not be cleared up until Cousins becomes a starter again, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else.