Post by Purple Pain on Aug 29, 2020 13:06:29 GMT -6
By most conventional measures, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins was a top-five signal-caller last season. His performance has been good enough two years into his paradigm-shifting, fully guaranteed contract that the team signed up for more of the same, extending him for two more seasons. So why does it feel like he still doesn’t quite get the credit he deserves?
Cousins had an 85.9 PFF passing grade last season, ranking fourth in the NFL. He also produced an 84.4 overall grade, which was good enough for fifth in the regular season. Remember, Cousins did this after a slow start that featured a particularly poor Week 2 performance against the Green Bay Packers in which he completed just 43.8% of his passes and generated a mere 25.8 overall grade. If you remove that game, his grade jumps into the 90.0s and he was as good as any quarterback in football.
Jan 5, 2020; New Orleans, Louisiana, USA; Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins (8) throws a pass during warm ups before a NFC Wild Card playoff football game against the New Orleans Saints at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Credit: Chuck Cook -USA TODAY SportsThat game did happen, though, so discounting it entirely isn’t a great process. But sometimes players have ugly days at the office that aren't representative of their future performance. Tossing out that outlier from Cousins vaults him into a pretty rare air of quarterback company league-wide. Over the past two seasons, he trails only Russell Wilson, Drew Brees and Patrick Mahomes in PFF passing grade without that game.
Of course, that gives him an unfair advantage. But even if we lose the worst game of all of the other top passers, Cousins maintains that spot as the No. 4 quarterback. He obviously adds no value with his legs, and a two-year view harms a player like Lamar Jackson, who was merely average as a rookie before exploding into an MVP season, but it does go some way to showing the kind of level Cousins has been operating at for the majority of his time with the Vikings. You can make a convincing argument that he is a top-five quarterback in the league right now.
Yet, general perception sees him as far back as the third-best quarterback in his own division. Why does a quarterback whose statistics are so good and whose grade has been so impressive continually fail to inspire confidence?
Cousins had an 85.9 PFF passing grade last season, ranking fourth in the NFL. He also produced an 84.4 overall grade, which was good enough for fifth in the regular season. Remember, Cousins did this after a slow start that featured a particularly poor Week 2 performance against the Green Bay Packers in which he completed just 43.8% of his passes and generated a mere 25.8 overall grade. If you remove that game, his grade jumps into the 90.0s and he was as good as any quarterback in football.
Jan 5, 2020; New Orleans, Louisiana, USA; Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins (8) throws a pass during warm ups before a NFC Wild Card playoff football game against the New Orleans Saints at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Credit: Chuck Cook -USA TODAY SportsThat game did happen, though, so discounting it entirely isn’t a great process. But sometimes players have ugly days at the office that aren't representative of their future performance. Tossing out that outlier from Cousins vaults him into a pretty rare air of quarterback company league-wide. Over the past two seasons, he trails only Russell Wilson, Drew Brees and Patrick Mahomes in PFF passing grade without that game.
Of course, that gives him an unfair advantage. But even if we lose the worst game of all of the other top passers, Cousins maintains that spot as the No. 4 quarterback. He obviously adds no value with his legs, and a two-year view harms a player like Lamar Jackson, who was merely average as a rookie before exploding into an MVP season, but it does go some way to showing the kind of level Cousins has been operating at for the majority of his time with the Vikings. You can make a convincing argument that he is a top-five quarterback in the league right now.
Yet, general perception sees him as far back as the third-best quarterback in his own division. Why does a quarterback whose statistics are so good and whose grade has been so impressive continually fail to inspire confidence?
...
It’s not that Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes never make (or made) mistakes. It’s that they never do something inexplicable. You can always at least trace the error back to a rational thought or process and learn from it moving forward. Cousins has lapses from which there is no opportunity for growth. You can’t learn from accidentally taking a knee or flinging the ball blindly backward across the field in a panic when pressure arrived. Those are objectively bad decisions — there was no good process that led him to that point. They just stain a player’s reputation.
Secondly, as much as Cousins is better than the prime-time win-loss record some use to attack him, there is something to the idea that he is less than Joe Montana when the chips are down. Over the past two seasons, his grade on first- and second-down passing plays ranks fourth in the league behind a trio of All-Pros. But on third and fourth down, he ranks ninth.
In the first three quarters of games, Cousins has an 85.6 PFF grade, but that grade drops to 76.0 in the fourth quarter and overtime — almost 10 full grading points lower. Though play under pressure is a noisy data point and not a strong predictor of future success, it’s a powerful descriptor in shaping the status of a player. While Cousins has been enjoying the best seasons of his career, he has ranked as just the 11th-best graded quarterback in the league under pressure — behind Baker Mayfield, whose play under pressure a season ago was woeful.
The Vikings don’t have a great offensive line, and while they have had receiving weapons, they have always been top-heavy. So, you could make the argument that Cousins hasn’t had the kind of supporting cast that should elevate his play, but he has played within an offensive scheme with a proven track record of doing exactly that. Cousins has been excellent when playing within the scope of the Vikings' offense, but he has seen a steep dropoff when things have broken down.
Over the past two seasons when trailing, Cousins ranks just 15th in PFF grade, further building a picture that the more disadvantageous the situation for passing is, the worse Cousins looks — critically not just relative to his own baseline, but relative to other passers throughout the NFL.
We often refer to “intangibles” when it comes to quarterback play. That unidentifiable quality the great players have and others are clearly lacking. It’s part of the old football lexicon and way of doing things that analytics is often trying hard to change. But when it comes to quarterback play, I think it might actually be onto something.
With more data at our fingertips than ever before, it’s not that these intangible qualities can’t be found or measured, but rather it speaks to players whose flaws or strengths are hard to uncover from the data. We can see from watching games that they exist — it just takes a deep dive into the database and the myriad ways football can be analyzed and studied to find the particular way they manifest for that player.
For Kirk Cousins, many ways of looking at data point to him being one of the very best quarterbacks in the NFL. Even moving beyond box score numbers to more advanced data sets, his outlook appears much stronger than people give him credit for.
You can start to pick at threads of that data and uncover reasons that he just doesn’t inspire the same confidence that some other quarterbacks do, though. The tougher the situation, and the more responsibility that rests on his shoulders, the more he seems to wilt and fade away from the best players in the league. This clearly isn’t an exhaustive study in what makes Cousins’ reputation lag behind his overall production, but it’s enough to suggest that the old-fashioned “eye test” isn’t completely baseless.
While it may seem harsh to view Cousins as lacking a certain “it factor” to be a great NFL quarterback, it does seem to be a fair charge — and one that he hasn’t yet shown he can knock down consistently. Cousins may be better than people think he is, but they pull back from giving him more credit because of a very real defect in his game.
Secondly, as much as Cousins is better than the prime-time win-loss record some use to attack him, there is something to the idea that he is less than Joe Montana when the chips are down. Over the past two seasons, his grade on first- and second-down passing plays ranks fourth in the league behind a trio of All-Pros. But on third and fourth down, he ranks ninth.
In the first three quarters of games, Cousins has an 85.6 PFF grade, but that grade drops to 76.0 in the fourth quarter and overtime — almost 10 full grading points lower. Though play under pressure is a noisy data point and not a strong predictor of future success, it’s a powerful descriptor in shaping the status of a player. While Cousins has been enjoying the best seasons of his career, he has ranked as just the 11th-best graded quarterback in the league under pressure — behind Baker Mayfield, whose play under pressure a season ago was woeful.
The Vikings don’t have a great offensive line, and while they have had receiving weapons, they have always been top-heavy. So, you could make the argument that Cousins hasn’t had the kind of supporting cast that should elevate his play, but he has played within an offensive scheme with a proven track record of doing exactly that. Cousins has been excellent when playing within the scope of the Vikings' offense, but he has seen a steep dropoff when things have broken down.
Over the past two seasons when trailing, Cousins ranks just 15th in PFF grade, further building a picture that the more disadvantageous the situation for passing is, the worse Cousins looks — critically not just relative to his own baseline, but relative to other passers throughout the NFL.
We often refer to “intangibles” when it comes to quarterback play. That unidentifiable quality the great players have and others are clearly lacking. It’s part of the old football lexicon and way of doing things that analytics is often trying hard to change. But when it comes to quarterback play, I think it might actually be onto something.
With more data at our fingertips than ever before, it’s not that these intangible qualities can’t be found or measured, but rather it speaks to players whose flaws or strengths are hard to uncover from the data. We can see from watching games that they exist — it just takes a deep dive into the database and the myriad ways football can be analyzed and studied to find the particular way they manifest for that player.
For Kirk Cousins, many ways of looking at data point to him being one of the very best quarterbacks in the NFL. Even moving beyond box score numbers to more advanced data sets, his outlook appears much stronger than people give him credit for.
You can start to pick at threads of that data and uncover reasons that he just doesn’t inspire the same confidence that some other quarterbacks do, though. The tougher the situation, and the more responsibility that rests on his shoulders, the more he seems to wilt and fade away from the best players in the league. This clearly isn’t an exhaustive study in what makes Cousins’ reputation lag behind his overall production, but it’s enough to suggest that the old-fashioned “eye test” isn’t completely baseless.
While it may seem harsh to view Cousins as lacking a certain “it factor” to be a great NFL quarterback, it does seem to be a fair charge — and one that he hasn’t yet shown he can knock down consistently. Cousins may be better than people think he is, but they pull back from giving him more credit because of a very real defect in his game.
... and neither is this Chris guy.