PHILADELPHIA — Is Kirk Cousins a great quarterback? Nick Siranni described him as such Thursday, four days before the Eagles' matchup Monday night against the Atlanta Falcons, and the characterization was striking.

Over Cousins' 13 years in the NFL, has anyone ever thought of him as great? Productive? Absolutely. From 2015 through 2022, his 17-game averages were excellent: a 67.5% completion percentage, 4,530 yards, 30 touchdowns, 11 interceptions, a 99.6 passer rating.

Wealthy? Hell, yeah. In March, he and the Falcons agreed to a four-year free-agent contract worth as much as $180 million. He signed that deal five months after he had torn his Achilles tendon — the injury's severity apparently deterred the Falcons not a bit from pursuing him — and six years after he had signed his first free-agent deal, a three-year contract with the Minnesota Vikings in which all $84 million was guaranteed.

To hear Sirianni tell it, Cousins has earned all that moolah and more.

"He's an unbelievable football player, and he has been for a long time. I have a lot of respect for him. He's a great football player," Sirianni said. "He is really accurate. He makes really good decisions with the football. That consistency, it's been noticed because he's done it for such a long time. He had his team in the playoffs two years ago. He's had some good teams. ... He's able to get the ball where it needs to go consistently. Got a lot of respect for him, and I think his track record speaks for itself."

OK, but great? Unbelievable? Cousins, clearly still returning to full health after his Achilles tear, was neither of those things in Atlanta's 18-10 loss to the Steelers last Sunday: 16 for 26, just 155 yards, a touchdown, and two interceptions. More to the point, though, the praise that Sirianni poured all over him provided a good reason to think about the two key questions that just about every NFL team tries to answer just about every single year: What exactly is a great quarterback, and how much is he worth?

These questions don't just drive debate and discussion within and about the NFL. They occupy the minds of the league's owners, coaches, and player-personnel directors. When a franchise, whether through serendipity or smarts, ends up with a Patrick Mahomes or a Tom Brady or an in-his-prime Aaron Rodgers, everything thereafter is easy.

But those players are rare, so a team is often left with a more challenging choice: Do we pay a very good quarterback or a promising quarterback as if he were already a great quarterback? Do we give ourselves over to the ever-rising tides of the QB-salary market, or do we refuse to tie up so much cap space in a player who probably won't carry us to a championship? Is it better to have loved Jared Goff at four years and $212 million or never to have loved at all?

One of the more interesting subplots of this Eagles-Falcons game is that the two teams have something in common: They attempted similar gambits to try to answer those questions and solve the puzzle of football's most important position.

The Falcons didn't just consign Desmond Ridder to the ash heap of Atlanta football history and spend gobs of money to sign Cousins. They used the eighth pick of this year's draft on University of Washington quarterback Michael Penix, whom they considered to be so talented that they couldn't pass him up.

Now, as you can imagine, this decision did not sit particularly well with Cousins. Like pretty much any veteran quarterback set on winning a Super Bowl, he would have preferred the Falcons use the pick on a player who might help the team immediately, not on his prospective successor. But there's no getting around the reality that Cousins is a 36-year-old quarterback coming off a serious injury from which some players never fully recover. It would have been irresponsible for the Falcons to presume a best-case scenario: that Cousins would return and remain in top form. And since they thought so highly of Penix, they snapped up what they believed to be two assets — their future starter and an above-average, low-cost backup — in one.

This strategy isn't much different from the one that the Eagles employed at the 2020 draft. They drafted Jalen Hurts in the second round with the intention of having him be Carson Wentz's insurance policy — not an unreasonable move, at least in theory. Wentz had suffered injuries to his knee, his back, and his head over the previous three years, and rather than shell out $10 million or more for an established QB, the Eagles figured Hurts could serve as their second-stringer while they developed him into either a possible starter (if Wentz got hurt again) or a valuable trade piece.

As it turned out, they fouled up ... kind of. They should have known that Wentz was so sensitive and self-absorbed that such a move would anger him to the point that he wouldn't want to play in Philadelphia anymore. Yes, Hurts' improvement allowed the Eagles to recover quickly from the financial and strategic fallout of trading Wentz. They nearly won a Super Bowl with a guy they drafted to be a backup, and then they signed him for $255 million.

Funny, though: Here the Eagles are now, after a crushing conclusion to last season, after Hurts' erratic performance last week, and everyone is asking the same question about Hurts that Nick Sirianni raised about Kirk Cousins. Is he a great quarterback? Really? Monday is another small step on the road to answering it, for both of them.

(c)2024 The Philadelphia Inquirer Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.