Kirk Cousins clearly isn’t thrilled with being hit with the franchise tag two years in a row.
But he said a recent conversation with owner Dan Snyder was not to demand a trade, but to get a sense of the direction of the franchise.
While that assumes there is one, Cousins said on Adam Schefter of ESPN’s podcast that he asked Snyder if he was going to be traded, but Snyder told him they wanted to keep him there. And that fell well short of the report he asked for a trade, which Cousins learned about while shoe shopping with his wife.
“I laughed and thought, ‘I don’t know where that comes from because that wasn’t the case,’” Cousins said. “Somehow it got twisted to where an employee of the store is using the word demanded. That’s not the approach I took. . . .
“In this league, things change so fast and players can get blindsided all the time with decisions. They’ll cut you on your birthday. They’ll cut you on the day your child is born. They’ll cut you on Christmas Eve. You never know what will happen. I’ll always keep an open mind so I won’t get blindsided, but from what I heard in conversations, I felt very much supported and felt the owner and president of the team want me to be the quarterback there and to be the quarterback there for a long time.”
Of course, if they wanted him there long-term, they’d work on a long-term contract. But while they might not want to pay him top-of-the-market money if they don’t consider him a top-of-the-market quarterback, the dictates of the franchise tag establishes a floor for the negotiations.