Ken Sugiura: After debacle, pressure is on Kirk Cousins, Falcons

FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. — You wouldn’t have expected this before the season started and certainly not after his game-winning two-minute drive against the Eagles in Game 2 or his record-setting 509-yard masterpiece against the Buccaneers in Game 5.

You probably would have been dismissive of the idea that, before the 13th game of the season, Falcons coach Raheem Morris would say that his team needed to come around in support of his quarterback with the nine-figure contract. But, as things happen with this franchise, so it was Wednesday.

With Kirk Cousins in a tailspin, Morris was called upon to tamp down any thought of No. 8 overall pick Michael Penix Jr. supplanting the veteran. The rookie Penix remains the quarterback of the future, and the 2024 team belongs to Cousins, Morris asserted.

“And right now, we’re all here to support Kirk Cousins and rally around him so he can finish the job that he started for this football team while he got us into first place and able to finish this thing and go out there and get it done,” Morris said.

It says something about Morris, forever emanating positive vibes, that he is ready to rally around the NFL’s most expensive free-agency acquisition of this past offseason as opposed to turning up the heat on him. But it also says something about Cousins and the Falcons as a whole that such action is now evidently needed.

Cousins needs to pull himself out of arguably the worst three-game stretch of his career. It’s the first time he has had three consecutive starts in one season with a passer rating below 80, and he has never gone three starts in a row without a touchdown. And he’ll have to do it in his first return to Minnesota, where he starred for six seasons before he was allowed to walk in free agency.

This is not what you count on when you sign a quarterback to a contract with $100 million guaranteed, a quarterback who played with indecisiveness, made rookie-grade mistakes, lacked power on his throws and was virtually the standalone reason why the Falcons lost for the third game in a row Sunday against the Chargers.

It’s reached a point where even cooler heads are acknowledging that it might be necessary to eventually play Penix. On the “Pushing the Pile” podcast, Falcons great and non-hothead Matt Ryan said this week that he didn’t think that Morris should make a move this week because starting Penix in a difficult road environment in Minnesota against a blitz-heavy defense would not make sense.

As endorsements of Cousins go, that probably was not one that he’ll be retweeting. Ryan also said that he felt that such a decision was still a couple of weeks away, “but if the performances continue like this, I think (Sunday) kind of accelerated that process.”

Rise up!

Can Cousins relocate his game?

He, Morris and others accentuated the positive Wednesday, as you might expect. Morris expressed his vast expanses of confidence and absence of concern for Cousins, saying “he’s built for this. He’s ready to go.”

Defensive lineman Grady Jarrett said that Cousins is just going through a hard time.

“But at the end of the day, we’ve still got five games left to go,” he said. “Nothing says we can’t catch fire, he can’t catch fire and light it up like he has been doing.”

Offensive coordinator Zac Robinson brushed off Cousins’ four-interception bomb as a low point that will happen to any player if he plays long enough.

“But Kirk’s going to keep swinging,” Robinson said. “He’s going to keep shooting, and he’s just going to get back at it and get back to work, which is exactly what he’s done.”

As for Cousins himself, he mentioned trying too hard to make plays.

“You’ve got to let the game come to you and let the plays happen as they present themselves,” he said. “That’s important, and I think I learned that again, as I have many times. I was reminded of that again on Sunday.”

But if Cousins can’t turn it around, this could get ugly. The calls for Penix will grow only louder. For a number of reasons, the Falcons won’t want to consider playing him.

They’ve dropped huge money on Cousins’ four-year deal with high expectations on return on investment.

As Morris said after Sunday’s home loss to the Chargers, “Kirk was brought here to put us in playoff position, to put us in position to go out there and find a way to get in the playoffs, get a home playoff game, win this division in the (NFC) South and everything’s still in front of us.”

Starting Penix — or even just sending him into the game in relief of Cousins in a game that the Falcons can still win — would create a thicket of problems and questions. Beyond the headache of who will start, which would be problematic enough, it would create heat on Morris and general manager Terry Fontenot for their decision to sign Cousins in the first place. And pressure would be everywhere on an organization that potentially could miss the playoffs for the seventh consecutive year, this time in a season when a coaching change was made and a $180 million quarterback signed with the purpose of getting into the postseason.

For the sake of long-tormented Falcons fans, let’s hope that Cousins has one more comeback in him. On Wednesday, he mentioned again his own history. He broke his ankle as a high school junior and feared he wouldn’t get a chance to play college football. When he signed with Michigan State, he was considered the lesser of two quarterbacks in the class but rose to become an All-Big Ten selection.

He was drafted in the fourth round by a team (Washington) after it selected its franchise quarterback (Robert Griffin III) in the first round but became the team’s starter for three seasons and has made four Pro Bowls in his career.

“At some point, they’ll tell you that, ‘Hey, you’re not going to get another chance,’ that your time is up in this league,” he said. “But until then, I’m going to keep trying to pick myself up off the mat and get back to work.”