The Vikings have opted to keep plenty of incumbent players in place, even with a new General Manager and head coach. However, G.M. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah admits that he at least pondered a quarterback change.
“I’ll be frank,” Adofo-Mensah told Jori Epstein of USA Today. “The one asset where you get nervous about not burning it down is quarterback.”
The General Manager acknowledges that Cousins is a “good quarterback,” but Adofo-Mensah added that “we don’t have Tom Brady . . . we don’t have Pat Mahomes.”
So is Cousins good enough?
“[The Super Bowl] is more likely to win if you have that quarterback,” Adofo-Mensah said. “It’s very unlikely to have that quarterback.”
The active Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks include Brady, Mahomes, Matthew Stafford, Nick Foles, Russell Wilson, Joe Flacco, and Aaron Rodgers. That’s seven, and only five of them are starters.
The problem for the Vikings is that, if they’d moved on from Cousins, who would they have gotten? There wasn’t an overabundance of potential upgrades at the position. Wilson and Deshaun Watson. That’s pretty much it, unless they could have lured Brady to the state where his mother grew up.
So they’ll hope to make it work with Cousins. Maybe having an offensive-minded coach will make a difference. Regardless, there’s a gap between Cousins and the best quarterbacks in the game. If Cousins is ever going to close that gap, now is the time.
And even with a little tough love coming from the G.M., Cousins should find a more welcoming atmosphere in the locker room, now that the curmudgeonly Mike Zimmer has left the organization.