There’s very definite soul searching to be done in the Atlanta front office. The organization’s all-in bid for a Super Bowl ring exploded in their faces with Kirk Cousins plummeting to earth, being benched, with the team left to pick up the pieces en route to an 8-9 record.
Thankfully there are two silver linings to this mess: Michael Penix Jr. has shown some flashes that he could be the QB of the future, and Raheem Morris showed the resolve to make the tough calls — indicative that he’s the right man for the job.
The downside is that GM Terry Fontenot is still in charge, and Terry Fontenot is weird. On Tuesday he opened up the Falcons’ combine week in Indianapolis by focusing on Cousins, before things got odd. Fortenot claims the team is going to be retaining Cousins for the upcoming season, citing that he wants him to back up Penix Jr. in 2025. If you’re following along at home, this means Atlanta are committing to a $40M cap hit on their backup QB — but the reality is they might not have an option.
It’s unclear at this point if anyone really wants Cousins to be their QB — especially for his massive price tag. Sure, the Falcons could try and trade him in the hopes someone would bite, which means Atlanta would have to still pay a significant portion of his 2025 salary, because teams aren’t going to accept Cousins at his current figure. Therefore, saying “we want him to be our backup” is a convenient cover, and a way to hedge a bad bet. It at least makes it appear like retaining Cousins has intentionality behind it, rather than desperation.
Keeping a $40M backup QB wasn’t even the strangest, or most alarming part of Fontenot talking to the press in Indianapolis. That would instead be discussion of whether or not the team knew that Cousins was injured.
A few highlights from Terry Fontenot’s comments to media thus far this morning:
-The Cousins injury comments during Super Bowl week caught the team off guard, he says, not aware of any injury issues past the Denver game
-They plan to hold on to Cousins as the backup to Penix (we’ll see)— The Falcoholic (@thefalcoholic.bsky.social) 2025-02-25T15:12:38.111Z
Cousins appeared on Good Morning Football in the lead up to the Super Bowl and detailed how he was hurt against the Saints in Week 10, and that injury became a nagging problem for the quarterback down the stretch.
“I, against the Saints, got hit pretty good in my right shoulder and elbow and from there kind of dealing with that was something I was working through and just never really could get it to where I wanted it,” Cousins said.
The statistics more or less back up Cousins’ account, because it wasn’t until after that Week 10 game that he truly fell off a cliff. Up to that point he’d thrown for almost 3,000 yards, 17 touchdowns, and seven interceptions. From the Saints game onwards his average yards per-attempt plummeted, his accuracy suffered, and he only managed to throw one touchdown to nine interceptions. Every sign points to the fact Cousins was injured for the remaining five games he played in — but the Falcons are digging in and swearing they had no idea he was hurt.
There are some problems with this excuse. Namely: It makes no sense. It assumes that Cousins never communicated with the team that he was hurt, that nobody questioned why he was struggling, and ignores the fact that playcalling changed drastically after that Saints game — indicative of a team trying to scheme around an injury.
Prior to the injury Cousins was ranked 14th in the NFL in Average Depth of Target (ADoT), which is a metric which indicated how deep plays are being called, and how confident a team is in a QB’s arm. Cousins’ ADoT plummeted after the injury in Week 10, averaging 27th in the league. It’s just one figure, but this is consistent with a QB who is struggling to throw the ball, and a team trying to mask it.
So why would the Falcons lie about the injury now? Well, it just so happens they never put him on the injury report. Here is how Cousins was listed on the report week-to-week after he says he sustained the injury:
- Week 11: Full Participant (right shoulder, right elbow)
- Week 12: Not on report
- Week 13: Not on report
- Week 14: Not on report
- Week 15: Not on report
- Week 16: Not on report
- Week 17: Not on report
Why the Falcons didn’t report any issue with Cousins is a mystery. Perhaps they wanted to mask making the switch to Penix. Maybe they didn’t want their opponents to know that Cousins was hurt. Either way it’s against NFL rules, and the Falcons know it. Punishment for failing to report ranges from fines, to potential loss of draft pick for repeat offenders — and guess what? The Falcons were fined in 2023 for not reporting an injury to Bijan Robinson prior to their Week 7 game, in which Robinson was limited before revealing he was feeling ill.
So history is not on the side of Fontenot and the Falcons on this one when it comes to being forthright. The result is now that Atlanta’s GM basically stood in front of reporters, said Kirk Cousins lied about his injury (or at least withheld information from the team), then said he was fine with a $40M backup.
The Falcons are weird as hell.
