Kirk Cousins met the media after signing his fully guaranteed three-year, $84 million contract with the Vikings Thursday and said that the reason he came to Minnesota wasn’t just about the contract.
Cousins said the deal “is what it is,” but said that the organization is what excites him about coming to a place he said he expects to spend the rest of his career. While breaking down the steps that led to Minnesota, Cousins’ agent Mike McCartney told a similar story.
McCartney admitted that “it was important for him to surpass Jimmy Garoppolo’s contract,” but said that Cousins didn’t take the biggest offer on the table.
“Two things I kept saying to Kirk,” McCartney said, via Chris Tomasson of the Pioneer Press. “Money is important, contract is important but I want you on a daily basis to jump out of bed excited to go to work, to go into a building that has a great culture and a chance to win. But at the same token at the end of the day, I want you to get excited to go home where your wife and family are flourishing and if we can find both of those I think we’ve done our job.”
McCartney didn’t say which team offered Cousins more money than the Vikings, but reporting leading up to his decision suggests the Jets are a good candidate. McCartney also didn’t say anything about the length of the other team’s offer or if it was fully guaranteed, both of which were surely significant pieces of information for Cousins and company when they were figuring out their next stop.