Open Thread: My American Cousins edition

Of my pre-season over/under bets discussed in the podcast, my most contrarian was Atlanta under 9.5, which was paying +140, reflecting the high degree of confidence people had in the post-Achillies era of Kirk Cousins. I am not counting my money while I’m sitting at the table — in the AFC South it doesn’t take even an especially good team to stumble into 10 wins — but the Falcons losing to the Patriots in week 1 certainly hasn’t made me less confident. But if you’re a Falcons fan the “how” has to be worse than the “what.” Kirk Cousins — whose speciality is moving the ball through play-action while mostly staying under center to increase the threat of the run game 00 — took almost no snaps under center and ran literally no play-action passes last Sunday:

He showed almost no mobility against the Steelers as if by design. Forty-eight of Atlanta’s 50 snaps came out of either the pistol or shotgun formation, which don’t require the quarterback to take a drop back into the pocket. The Falcons also didn’t have a single snap of play-action passing. Only one NFL team had a zero play-action game in all of the 2023 season.

The game plan was not health-related, Morris said, but it’s a fair assumption to make considering that it’s a different approach than Cousins has had success with in the past. In 2022, when the quarterback led the Vikings to 13 regular-season wins and threw for 4,547 yards, Minnesota was fourth in the league in the use of play-action (19.3 percent of snaps) and 29th in the league in snaps out of shotgun (53.1 percent).

Maybe Cousins will have gotten materially more mobile in the last 6 days. Maybe the Falcons were playing rope-a-dope. The more plausible inferences are rather less comorting if you’re not rooting for Atlanta to lose. Although it is perhaps a clue into why Atlanta would invest the 8th overall pick in an overage QB prospect when they already had their nominal franchise QB in place.

With respect to the most recent big NFL news, I think this all there is to say:

If Tagovailoa decides that the game is no longer worth the risk, he has no obligation or responsibility to anybody else to think about it any differently. More than most modern players, he has put his faith in a league and in a team that had no problem ignoring his long-term health in sacrifice of short-term gain. 

At some point for every player, it becomes more about the person. And if Tua Tagovailoa decides that this is that time, “Good for him” should be the only response.