Kirk Cousins: Under Pressure

Under pressure.

Chances are, after you read that, this little tune will go through your head:

Dun, dun, dun, dun-dun-dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun, dun-dun-dun, dun.

And chances are, after you're done mentally rocking out to that bass line from the hit Queen and David Bowie song, you'll think of Ice Ice Baby, which sampled said bass line en route to becoming the first hip-hop single to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It was a silky smooth dance track that transcended setting (and Vanilla Ice's very early '90s delivery), playable within the walls of the club or beneath the soft top of that slick Chrysler LeBaron convertible you absolutely had to have in red.

(My older sister was disappointed when my dad wouldn't let her buy your LeBaron 14 years later.)

The Ice connection is appropriate, though, because a quarterback under pressure needs to be calm, cool and collected -- some might even say that a QB who completes a long pass under duress has, yes, ice in his veins.

And, in the way that Ice was at one point stingy with the attribution to Queen and Bowie (But my song has an extra ding!), quarterbacks who thrive under pressure aren't always given the credit they're due. Well, we're here to fix that.

To organize our list of the top 10 QBs under pressure in 2019, we're going to rely on two specific numbers tracked by Next Gen Stats. The first is passer rating under pressure, a slightly modified version of a traditional metric that most football fans should understand (158.3 is perfect, while anything 100 or better is pretty darn good, etc.). The second is completion percentage above expectation while under pressure, which might be the best indicator of all. How effective are you in the most trying moments on the football field? That statistic attempts to answer that question.

The criteria for this is simple: Quarterbacks must have thrown a minimum of 250 pass attempts. That's going to loop in some quarterbacks who only played half of a season, like Matthew Stafford and Ryan Tannehill, for example. Yes, this means you'll see some names here that didn't qualify for my earlier ranking of the top 10 deep passers -- but that ranking required a larger sample size to provide an accurate picture.

Enough of the introduction. Let's sort this out.

5. Kirk Cousins

UNDER PRESSURE: 91.5 passer rating, +3.8% completion rate above expectation, 58.1% completion rate.

Cousins was a stud under pressure in the earliest years of NGS tracking, which helped destroy a narrative of him being average at the absolute best. But thanks to a play-action offense built out of an emphatic rushing attack led by Dalvin Cook, Cousins doesn't face as much pressure as he once did. Even with that considered, he still lands in the top five of most under-pressure metrics. His passer rating under pressure was fifth-best, his completion percentage under pressure was fourth-best and his completion percentage above expectation while pressured was also in the top five. You won't often see Cousins' name mentioned among the Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes of the league, but he has the numbers to back it up.