Cousins and His Many Interceptions

Cousins’s interceptions

Packers coach Matt LaFleur had an interesting thought on Kirk Cousins’s league lead in interceptions.

“Kirk is always going to be a guy who is going to throw with anticipation,” LaFleur said. “Sometimes, that’s the product of doing business. When you throw with anticipation you could be susceptible to some interceptions. That’s just the way it is.”

Cousins’s interception rate is bound to come down. He’s getting picked off on 5.7% of passes versus a 2.4% career rate — which is about the same as Matt Stafford and Drew Brees’s career marks.

But it’s an interesting thought about a fundamental criticism about Cousins: That he struggles in the drop-back passing game where QBs often need to find tight windows to succeed.

Cousins had his own thoughts on the matter.

“If there was a theme [to the interceptions], it would just be, ‘Hey, maybe less aggressive, less trying to make the big play,’” Cousins said. “I think one thing we’ve done really well as an offense is we’ve been really explosive. We’ve had a lot of big plays. The problem has been when we’re not having those explosive plays, we aren’t getting the singles. We’re hitting home runs, we’re hitting triples, but we’re not hitting as many singles. In my background, I’ve been a guy that’s hit a lot of singles, if you will, so maybe just trying to get back to hitting singles, even if it means we miss a home run, even if it means we don’t get the big play, being consistent, staying ahead of the chains, staying out of third-and-long.”

Cousins’s baseball comparison is pretty well backed up by the numbers.

He leads the league with 13.1 yards per completion but that’s well above his career 11.5 average. His average completion is traveling 8.4 yards through the air, the highest in the NFL. Last year that number was 6.0.

Cousins is currently profiling like 2019 Jameis Winston whereas under Kevin Stefanski he was more like Jared Goff.

Some of that might be circumstantial since the Vikings have played from behind more often and some might be a change in play calling philosophy.

“It starts with his feet, with making sure that he doesn’t predetermine routes,” Mike Zimmer said of the interceptions. “There’s so many things that we talk about.”

The Vikings’ head coach was asked about his message to Cousins after some of his struggles.

“An old coach told me one time, when you don’t play as well as you hoped it’s, ‘What are you going to do when you get back in the huddle on Monday and they’re all looking at you?’” Zimmer said. “You’ve got to go in there and prove that you’re the guy. You’ve got to go back in and do it. You’ve got to go back out and fight and show everybody that you’re the guy that they can rely on. That’s what it’s really all about and what I’ve told him before. ‘If everybody is looking at you, now what are you going to do?’”

Cousins will get the opportunity to show everyone he’s “the guy” against a Green Bay defense that ranks fifth worst in QB rating against.