This is the day. This is the day Kirk is finally traded. That’s what I’ve been saying to myself for the past two months. It’s all I think about, it’s all I want, and, in my desperate mind, the prospect of it actually happening grows closer by the day.
The NFL combine is this week, which means that the league’s offseason market will begin in earnest. Free agency doesn’t technically begin until March 16th, but all of the groundwork for player movement can get going right now: contract extensions, free agent pre-tampering, and trades. That last one is important, because there are a number of high-profile names, including the reigning two-time league MVP, who could be on the block. There are so many potential trades in the air that I ruminate over the possibilities endlessly, leaving my greater imagination unused and in need of urgent care.
And yet I ruminate, because there’s only one player I care about seeing traded above all, and that is Kirk Cousins.
I have tried to manifest a Kirk trade into being, mostly through checking my phone 7,000 times a day. I have mentally traded him to Carolina, to Denver, back to Washington (lol), and to all points beyond. I’ve traded him for three first-rounders. I’ve traded him for nothing at all. No matter how I trade Kirk in my head, the vision of it pleases me. If I could pay a shaman to sprinkle acacia leaves all over Eagan to drive Kirk away, I would do so. I will do ANYTHING to rid myself of this asshole.
Whether or not the Vikings themselves want to move Kirk is painfully unclear at the moment. Nothing reported or even directly said about their intentions has been definitive on the matter. But the situation the Vikings face is very much definitive. Kirk is entering the final year of a contract that carries a $45 million cap hit, for a losing team that's already $11 million-plus over the cap before free agency has set to begin. Reports say Kirk won’t settle for any extension that pays him less than $40 million a year going forward. That’s way too much money for a guy who fucking sucks.
And Kirk Cousins very much does suck. I know because I’ve lived through four years of the Kirk Cousins Experience. You don’t want the KCE, I promise you. I’m a Vikings fan who lives in Washington, so I was here when Kirk was drafted by the Commanders, usurped Robert Griffin III’s starting job, and then was run out of town despite posting mainstream stats that would have casual fans—myself included—believing he was a franchise cornerstone. When my team swooped in and signed Kirk after making the NFC title game a year prior, I felt stupidly optimistic. And why wouldn’t I? Washington fans knew dick, and my team needed an upgrade. The Vikings chose Kirk over re-signing any of their three quarterbacks at the time: Case Keenum, Teddy Bridgewater, and Sam Bradford. It was the right choice on paper, and may even remain so. Bradford washed out of the NFL in 2018, and both Keenum and Bridgewater became career journeymen. Kirk is a better quarterback than all of them.
That no longer matters. To cheer for Kirk Cousins is a special kind of hell that I wouldn’t wish on anyone except for 31 other fanbases. And I put up with rooting for Adrian Peterson, mind you. I’m willing to eat a lot of shit. But not this. I feel ill rooting for Kirk Cousins. Like I have a disease. And I don’t need to make a case against him when a simple “Kurt” thrown back in my face does the job efficiently and effectively. He never fucking wins anything, and yes, QB wins are a meaningful stat. He does everything by the book because he doesn’t believe in himself at all. No defense fears him. He can't move. His numbers while under duress are abysmal. His teammates hate him. His coaches hate him. People I know who cover the Vikings hate covering him. He’s a team cancer without a vaccination card, and I want him gone. Forever. Trading him is the subtraction that adds to everything.
I don’t even care what the Vikings get back for Kirk. If they have to pay off $20 million of his 2022 salary for another team to take him, so be it. If they only get back a fifth-rounder, so be it. If they have to CUT Kirk, eat his entire cap hit, and spend 2022 going 3–14 to recoup their losses, I’ll accept that as well. I don’t give a fuck. To know Kirk is to be sick of him. The Commanders, as pathetic as they are, understood this and cut ties accordingly. Since letting Kirk walk, they’ve won a division title. The Vikings have not. If Kirk was gonna make a difference with the Vikings, or with any other team, he would’ve done so already. He hasn’t. He can’t. He is shit.
Serious football minds know this, but many NFL teams are run by charlatans, losers, and outright imbeciles. There are marks out there who may labor under the delusion that they can "fix" Kirk. Unfortunately for me, there’s a nonzero chance that the Vikings, who just hired new leadership in general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and head coach Kevin O’Connell, are one such team. Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell have come to Minnesota both preaching an atmosphere of collaboration and cooperation with players, which is a nice change from their respective predecessors. I like these two gentlemen. I really do. But there’s still the transactional business of creating a good roster to tend to. In terms of ability, comportment, and salary, Kirk is a tax on such efforts. Collaboration is a waste of time with him. I’d have an easier time getting through to a krokodil addict than a grinning shithead who got COVID just in time to skip out on a trip to Lambeau. Hitch your wagon to Kirk and it ends up in a fucking ditch.
The problem is that Vikings owner Zygi Wilf and his brother Mark reportedly want to win right away with this new leadership group. So it’s risky, in theory, to trade Kirk away to a hard-up franchise like Carolina and roll the dice with Matt Corral or some other rookie. But what exactly is worth preserving about this Vikings outfit? It’s expensive and old in all the wrong places, and it’s led by the least respected signal caller in the history of the sport. Despite the fact that I write about football for a living, and despite the fact that I played football for many years, I have a relatively common football mind. I daydream about unworkable trades, I make unrealistic demands of my team from far away, and I don’t really know how to do Adofo-Mensah’s job. But I do know that Kirk Cousins is a ticket to extinction. I have four years of proof, and so does Adofo-Mensah.
So if both he and O’Connell think they can turn Kirk into something he’s not through science or magic, then I’m smarter than they are, which isn’t a good omen. I need them to understand what every other sensible Vikings fan understands, which is that Kirk needs to go. For his sake and for Minnesota’s. Pack him up in a Styrofoam box and ship him off to some other asshole team. Let THEM be the butt of football’s cruelest joke for a few years, and let me live in peace.
Because if Kirk is still under center for the Vikings this fall, I will fucking die. My heart will dissolve, my brain will melt down into my throat, and everything will turn sheet white. I will feel myself lifting away from the Earth’s surface, toward a great white light. I will let go of my body and my life history, accepting what eternity has in store for me. I will arrive at a great entrance to the beyond. And there, asking me for my papers, will be fucking Kirk Cousins, ready to eat away at the remains of my soul. That pile of shit.
