The Return Of The Kirk Cousins Chaos Meter

In Week 13, 2020, the Minnesota Vikings played the Jacksonville Jaguars in one of the drunkest games I can remember. The game featured a tipped touchdown to Leviska Shenault, a Jordan Brailford safety, four fumbles, three interceptions, a squandered 10-point lead, a squandered 8-point lead, and an overtime walk-off field goal.

Watch the highlights for an unparalleled “remember some guys” experience, underscored by the uncanny valley crowd-noise track that broadcasts played in 2020 to make empty stadiums feel less like liminal spaces you’d meet Slenderman in.

With Kirk Cousins throwing three touchdowns, turning the ball over twice, and taking four sacks, the ups and downs were exhausting. He had games like this from time to time. He also got so conservative he’d lull the offense to sleep, and sometimes would find the perfect balance, leading to excellent performance.

And so, I decided to make a scale for the chaos: The Kirk Cousins Chaos Meter. I divided Cousins’ performances into four buckets, from the most conservative checkdown-happy no-show to games like the one that inspired it.

From there until Kirk Cousins played his last game as a Viking, I’d rate his game on the Chaos Meter. As Cousins’ career in Minnesota continued, I added references to all of the funny or memorable moments that came to pass. It became something of an archive of the six years that Kirk Cousins quarterbacked the Vikings, and the stories that gripped us over that time.

From a myriad of baffling quotes about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine controversy, his propensity to dress like a Kohl’s Dad, a game so chaotic it broke the meter, and the ups and downs of his time in Minnesota, the Chaos Meter grew.

After Cousins went down with a torn Achilles in 2023, the meter went dormant. But Kirk Cousins is back in Minnesota, and so returns the Cousins Chaos Meter. 

Cousins still exhibits moments from all four categories, even through his time in Atlanta and most recently, in Las Vegas. As a way to gauge Cousins’ quality, the meter is not particularly useful. But in terms of sorting out the vibes, the Kirk Cousins Chaos Meter knows no parallel.

The Cousins Chaos Meter is a scientific¹ instrument that reads the mood of the cosmos after a given game. The cosmos is fickle, and the meter may not read in a way that matches a game's results. The Vikings may win games on the icy or fiery edges of the meter, and lose a game with a reading in the green. 

I am but the recorder. The meter is the authority. Let us examine each of the four categories.

Kirk Cousins has a reputation as a conservative person, in several senses of the word. ConservaKirk dresses like an amalgamation of every dad in suburbia and drives a beat-up van despite career earnings over $330,000,000. He eats In-N-Out after games and sings in his local church choir.

ConservaKirk would welcome a gay teammate, but would hope to lead him to Jesus. Behaving like a frothing, MAGA conservative would not be becoming of ConservaKirk. ConservaKirk wants nothing less than to make a stir about politics — the one time he did was an unpleasant experience, to say the least. A round of golf, though, is not out of the question.

On the field, ConservaKirk is who turns Captain Kirk into Captain Checkdown, like in the infamous Cooper Rush Cowboys game of 2021. Cousins doesn’t check down as often as he has the reputation for, but that’s because he is not always ConservaKirk. But when ConservaKirk shows up, the passing offense reduces to Shrinky Dink proportions.

In the aforementioned Cowboys game, Cousins’ Average Depth of Target fell to 4.9 yards. Two years prior, on a Thursday Night against Washington, he turned in an ADoT of 3.9. His lowest came in a wind-affected contest at Lambeau Field in week 8 of 2020, an ADoT of 1.6 yards.

ConservaKirk isn’t just about checking down. Sometimes a checkdown is exactly what the play requires, and against certain defensive performances, it’s the best way to move the ball. ConservaKirk is not for these times. 

In fact, that Lambeau Wind Game registered in the yellow on the Chaos Meter. ConservaKirk is about taking all of the possible chaos out of the game, which means removing offense from the game. The meter will not output a ConservaKirk designation in a game dictated by weather.

ConservaKirk will go 3-and-out without throwing once past the sticks, like in this sequence from a shutout loss last year.

He declines a solid completion to Kyle Pitts on first down with linebackers dropping too deep (ignoring Drake London on the deep curl as well), then chooses Tyler Allgier behind the line of scrimmage over Charlie Woerner near the line to gain. On the resulting 3rd and 12, he has no choice but to deliver the ball behind the sticks again and hope for the best.

Cousins would be benched soon after.

ConservaKirk isn’t even considering risk or reward; he’s defaulting to the checkdown. The checkdown, the allure of the completion, calls to him like the Green Goblin mask. He hurries through the progression to get to it.

Here’s a particularly egregious example from an otherwise chaotic game, last week against the 49ers. Deommodore Lenoir completely busts the coverage, but Cousins is locked into his first read, Brock Bowers, who is not open.

Cousins did recently say that Bowers is open, even when he isn’t, like Justin Jefferson. But to refuse to progress because of that is no longer trust in your favorite players; it’s autopilot. It’s a pair of khakis with a beige shirt. It’s Adam Ragusea’s pot of horrifying cold fish. It’s bland, repetitive, and stands no chance of changing the status quo.

But as I said, the checkdown isn’t always a bad thing. It’s simply unchaotic. Sometimes the best move is to play by the rules.

“Game Manager” is a moniker that gets a bad reputation. That term followed Tom Brady all the way to the championship on six separate occasions. I agree with the label — Tom Brady was a game manager, and that was a good thing. Game management at a high enough level becomes ruthless, unstoppable efficiency.

Perhaps “Field General” is a better moniker. Generating on-time completions, staying ahead of the chains, and producing sustained scoring drives is nothing to sneeze at in the NFL. A good Game Manager can adjust at the line of scrimmage, can into the right play, and execute the way the play is intended. 

If it works on the whiteboard, it’ll work with a Game Manager. Look no further than Kyle Shanahan and Brock Purdy, who lead the league in EPA/Dropback since Purdy’s first full season as a starter in 2023. 

Game Manager Kirk dresses sensibly but stylishly. He has a chain, but it says Kohl’s Cash. He hands the ball off. He picks his children up from school on time, and goes to sleep at a responsible 10:30 PM. He tried homebrewing blonde lagers once, and likes to talk about the band he almost started in high school.

There’s not much remarkable about Game Manager Kirk one way or another, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of people would kill for a warm home, a loving family, and a stable routine.

This year against the Jets, Cousins finds Jalen Nailor for a first down on a well-executed progression against man coverage.

Cousins sees nobody open on the left, the front side of the play, progresses onward, and hits Jalen Nailor late in the read. It’s an efficient first down and a great example of the power of Game Manager Kirk.

Game Manager Kirk also includes games where Kirk Cousins didn’t have much influence. If he avoided mistakes but also avoided big, explosive plays, the game probably came down to something else. The meter defaults to the yellow zone in those situations.

At the end of 2022, the Vikings played the New York Giants. Statistically, it was a great game for Cousins: two passing touchdowns, one rushing touchdown, and an overall EPA/play of 0.31. The game-ending sequence got plenty of attention, but not nearly as much as Minnesota’s full-scale defensive dismantling, which led to a staff clearout. 

That game isn’t about Cousins. It’s not known as a Cousins game; it’s known as the game where Daniel Jones and Brian Daboll exposed the fraudulent 2022 Vikings. He did not add chaos, nor did he remove it; he just played quarterback, and the game played out as it did. The game happened to him as much as it happened to all of us.

Game Manager games can easily be misconstrued as critiques of a game where Cousins played well, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a proxy for games where Cousins wasn’t particularly chaotic, nor was he particularly conservative. That’s no slight.

It is distinct, however, from games where Cousins takes over, bending the will of the sport to his whims. Sometimes, Kirk stops merely worshipping God, and instead becomes His avatar.

As Peak Kirk, Cousins finds the perfect balance between chaos and control, creating an unstoppable rhythm. It’s a Goldilocks zone that represents the maximum that Cousins has to offer.

Peak Kirk ascends beyond the limits of the mortal. He doesn’t need his Pizza Ranch punch card because his form has evolved past the need for subsistence. He experiences time like Jared Leto’s character in Jaco Van Dormael’s 2009 film Mr. Nobody — he knows all that has been, and that could be, perhaps even exerting control over the threads of reality itself.

Peak Kirk, or as Kwesi Adofo-Mensah once described it, “Zero Dark Lebron” mode, somehow pulls off gaudy chains and breaks into the MVP conversation. It doesn’t matter that he can’t really perform the Griddy; he’ll have the whole team behind him. He’ll hit the dead-arm dance and make it a sensation. He controls culture as well as he controls his ball placement.