Kirk Cousins Still Bitter About His Treatment in Washington

Kirk Cousins ended up getting exactly what he wanted. He got a massive payday so he didn’t have to worry about money and could just play football.

Yet something was more important than even that, crazy as it may sound. Cousins wanted to be somewhere he’d be better appreciated. He wanted to go to a team that viewed him as a legitimate franchise quarterback who could be their missing piece for a possible Super Bowl run. Based on his behavior in Washington right up until the end, he never got that feeling from the Redskins.

This was validated to an extent when head coach Jay Gruden confirmed he felt the team had gotten better at quarterback with the arrival of Alex Smith via trade. Now in fairness that was a standard answer from a public relations and locker room perspective. Still, after all, Cousins had done the previous three years it must’ve been hard not to take it a bit personally.

It turns out that was definitely the case. In an interview with Dan Pompei of The Athletic, Cousins explained the vastly different ways he was perceived in Washington versus how it is today in Minnesota.

"“Here, I’m known as the starting quarterback and a seven-year veteran,” Cousins says. “So I’m instantly given a platform and place to lead from. In Washington, I was a fourth-round pick. I was a guy who had been benched. I was a guy who was figuring it out. A guy with the franchise tag. So the perception can be different.”"

Kirk Cousins has a right to feel this way

It’s a fair question to ask. What more could Cousins have done to earn respect from Washington? He threw for over 4,000 yards in three-straight seasons. He had 81 touchdown passes to just 36 interceptions. Also, he won at least seven games each of his three seasons despite not being surrounded by the greatest supporting cast at times. Any team with common sense wouldn’t turn their noses up at something like that.

Then again the Redskins are an organization that hasn’t been governed by common sense for a long time. Every time they seem to have a good formula in place, they find ways to mess with it and inevitably end up ruining it. Nowhere is that clearer than at the quarterback position. In 1998 they had something brewing with a young upstart named Trent Green. After one season he left for St. Louis after the Redskins tried to lowball him on a new contract. He became a two-time Pro Bowler.

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A year later they signed veteran Brad Johnson who went to the Pro Bowl that season. However, he struggled a bit the next season in 2000 and was allowed to leave via free agency like Green. He landed softly in Tampa Bay, winning the Super Bowl in 2002. This organization has a bad habit of letting quality quarterbacks slip away due to unreasonable expectations or simply being cheap.

In Cousins’ case, it seems it was both.