Week 5 of the 2024 NFL season kicked off Thursday with every kind of quarterback acclaim, each previous and current: Atlanta Falcons nice Matt Ryan officially entered the staff’s Ring of Honor, and visiting Tampa Bay Buccaneers captain Baker Mayfield made one other gutsy plea for early season MVP consideration, shining as each a scrambler and thrower en path to a would-be 4-1 begin atop the NFC South. And but, in the long run, Thursday evening’s prime-time showdown belonged to a different quarterback fully: Kirk Cousins.
Three weeks earlier, the Falcons’ prized offseason addition stole the late-night highlight with a simple game-winning end towards the favored Philadelphia Eagles. It proved to be a shiny blip in an in any other case muddy begin to Cousins’ tenure as Atlanta’s new signal-caller, with the Falcons offense getting into Thursday’s divisional contest ranked simply nineteenth and twenty first in yards and factors per sport, respectively.
Thursday was completely different. A definitive coming-out celebration for the Cousins offense, if you’ll. Sure, the Buccaneers have been down two key starters in Calijah Kancey and do-it-all security Antoine Winfield Jr. That does not imply Todd Bowles’ protection was going to be a cakewalk, getting into the NFC South battle as a top-10 scoring unit, contemporary off a suffocation of the Eagles, and extra primed to carry additional strain than simply about any staff — not precisely a really perfect matchup for an growing old, bodily restricted pocket passer.
Inform that to Cousins. Even whereas sustaining his signature stationary posture of 2024, preserving his 36-year-old surgically repaired Achilles as finest he may, the previous Minnesota Vikings veteran carried out a surgical procedure of his personal, rifling one tight-window dart after one other to the last word tune of 509 yards — essentially the most thrown by any quarterback this season, or by Cousins in his eight-year profession, or by anybody in Falcons historical past. His fourth and closing landing, a pinpoint walk-off bullet, helped make a hero out of damage sub KhaDarel Hodge, and it would’ve reignited all hope for what the 2024 Falcons could be.
If Cousins, in spite of everything, could be this “restricted,” but this exact, this resilient, this game-changing as a crunch-time distributor of the soccer, clearly elevating cross catchers like Hodge and Drake London and Darnell Mooney, then it is no surprise the Falcons paid a reasonably penny to safe his companies again in March. This is not the Kirk Cousins of outdated, associates; you understand, the one who makes the rounds on social media not as a prime-time darling however a run-of-the-mill meme, eternally ridiculed for bright-light hiccups.
His 11 game-winning drives for the reason that begin of 2022 are — get this — essentially the most amongst all quarterbacks, per CBS Sports activities analysis. Since then, he is additionally 9-5 towards groups with a successful report, and 2-0 as a “Monday Evening Soccer” underdog the final two seasons, upsetting the eventual NFC champion San Francisco 49ers with a near-flawless 2023 displaying. And he is now the first quarterback to ever throw 450 yards in a sport for 3 completely different groups: the Falcons, Vikings and Washington Commanders.
That is to not say Cousins has been invulnerable; half his closing season with Minnesota, keep in mind, was misplaced resulting from damage, and he is nonetheless seeking a defining postseason stretch, practically sliding to 2-3 to begin 2024, had Mayfield’s supporting solid merely managed the ball late. However a monster displaying when it mattered most on Thursday, in entrance of a crowd nonetheless drying tears from recollections of Matt Ryan’s big-time profession, staring down a deeper gap within the ultra-tight South? Thirty-six factors, every kind of spectacular ball placement and, most significantly, a well-earned “W” will do.
