The veteran quarterback seems unlikely to stick around as a backup.
Earlier this week, I took a look at what options were available to the Atlanta Falcons when it came to Kirk Cousins. Now benched, the team’s expensive free agent signing could stay, be cut, or be traded, and it was simply a matter of the route the team wanted to take and Cousins would allow.
I suggested that Cousins’ contract was not as impossible to trade as it might seem, given that the team taking him on would get a relatively affordable amount of guaranteed money while the Falcons ate the rest, and the upcoming quarterback market between the draft and free agency looks grim. Readers suggested quite reasonably that Cousins might not be willing to play ball, given that the Falcons unfortunately gave him a no-trade clause despite knowing they’d want to move on from him two-to-three years into the deal.
Here comes Adam Schefter with some clarity, and it sounds like Cousins will indeed not be amenable to a trade. With sources in other front offices and likely armed with intel from Cousins’ agent, Schefter suggests that as I suspected, the Falcons will move on from Cousins ahead of March 17, when a $10 million roster bonus guarantees. The widespread expectation across the league, he reports, is that the Falcons will have to cut Cousins and send him into the open market, with a similar situation to Russell Wilson after he was cut by the Broncos.
Leaguewide, executives (and maybe Cousins’ camp, though they’re not named in the piece) think the way the Falcons handled the quarterback throughout the spring will make a split inevitable. Cousins was infamously not told the Falcons would draft Penix until they were on the clock, and reports in the immediate aftermath indicated that he was unhappy the team both A) drafted his successor and B) did not make a pick that would help the team in 2024.
Of course, as we pointed out throughout the summer and early in the season when Cousins was playing fairly well, all Cousins had to do to quiet the noise and park Penix was thrive as the starting quarterback. Atlanta’s selection of Penix looks like it will pay off far more than the Cousins signing right now, before he’s taken a snap, because Cousins had rapidly become an albatross for this team’s 2024 season.
But it’s difficult to blame Cousins, who signed a multi-year deal with a lot of guaranteed money, for not exactly jumping up and down for joy to see his successor immediately drafted and to find himself benched before the end of the first year of his contract. Expecting him to do any favors for this Falcons team in light of that is probably expecting too much.
Naturally, the Falcons are not willing to call it a day on any scenario, with an unnamed team official telling Schefter they could actually keep Cousins given Penix’s modest cap hit. If Cousins is unhappy and still wants to start—and every indication we have at this point suggests that—then that’s probably not going to happen.
A Falcons official told ESPN on Saturday morning that it was too early to determine whether the organization would release Cousins. The official added that Penix’s relatively low salary cap number for 2025 ($5.2 million) gives the Falcons the financial flexibility to potentially keep Cousins.
This all suggests a potentially messy situation, but we should also remember that unnamed league executives have zero reason to do the Falcons any favors and potentially one big reason to work to create an environment in which Cousins’ release seems inevitable. The smart money likely is on the Falcons cutting Cousins with a post-June 1 designation to lessen their 2025 cap hit—we’re talking about $40 million potentially offset by the salary a signing team give Cousins versus $65 million for a pre-June 1 cut—but much can happen between now and March to challenge those assumptions. The problem for Atlanta is that there is no inexpensive scenario here, and the fact that Cousins did not even survive a year of his contract makes this the latest in al long line of quarterback-related fiascoes for this football team.
Regardless, unless there’s a lot of happy language coming from Cousins and the Falcons in the coming months, Cousins likely winds up elsewhere in 2025. The Falcons had better hope Penix thrives with that scenario potentially on the way.