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Things are fairly good for the Washington Redskins right now. They’re in first place, albeit in a terrible NFC East. After some lean years in the nation's capital, nobody is complaining.*
But there’s a really difficult question coming that you know the front office is already wrestling with: What will they do with the Kirk Cousins contract situation?
Cousins is in the final year of his contract and will be a free agent in a few months. He got his first chance this season to be the full-time starter, after coach Jay Gruden finally had the opportunity to pull the plug on Robert Griffin III. And Cousins has done fairly well. He has been up and down, but overall the results have been solid. He has 18 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. Cousins had 300 yards in a 24-21 win over the Chicago Bears on Sunday, as Washington improved to 6-7 and remained in first place. Every game like that improves Cousins’ negotiating power.
NFL teams have a crippling fear of the unknown at quarterback. They’d rather dump a ton of money on a known mediocre option than try to start over. At this point, there’s no reason for Cousins to sign a team-friendly deal. He has gotten this far, so he might as well play it out and hit the open market, unless Washington really makes it worth his time to sign before mid-March.
Since free agency started in its current form, no good quarterback in his prime has ever hit free agency (unless the team had a backup plan in place, like Philip Rivers with Drew Brees, who was coming off a serious injury). If it ever does happen, there might be a frenzy among teams who are truly desperate at quarterback. Look at how many suitors Josh McCown had this past offseason. There are some general managers who don’t have a quarterback and understand they won’t be around to reap the benefits of developing a new one. This will surprise you, but NFL coaches and general managers often make less-than-ideal decisions in an attempt to save their own jobs. So if some GM had a choice of overpaying Cousins, who has a 93.2 rating this season, or waiting on a college prospect like Jared Goff or Paxton Lynch to bear fruit, you can probably guess what he’d choose.
This puts Cousins in a tremendous spot. He’s going to get overpaid. Even if you have a tremendous opinion of Cousins, he’s going to get overpaid based on what he has done. If you think Cousins is at best a middle-of-the-road NFL starter (I'm raising my hand) then he’s really going to get overpaid.
This puts the Redskins in a really tough spot. If Cousins thinks he can make $16 million per year — laugh if you wish, but that’s what Andy Dalton got per year on his deal before his breakout this season, and Dalton’s deal ranks 18th in average salary per season among NFL quarterbacks according to Spotrac — is that a good investment? Or do the Redskins just slap the franchise tag on him to get another year of evaluation? The franchise tag last year was $18.544 million. Wow. Cousins isn’t worth that. But it’s not like Washington can just tell Cousins how much he’ll make and call it a day. The market will determine his worth. Washington has to make a choice if it wants to pay that price.*
Then add in that Washington has won just one playoff game since the end of the 1999 season — that came in the wild-card round 10 years ago — and there’s a chance the Redskins win a fairly ridiculous division title in an awful division, and that complicates things even further. If any team is going to take a stand and not overpay a quarterback like Cousins before he hits free agency, it probably wouldn't be this Washington team coming off a division title.
Do you think you can build a championship team paying Cousins $16 million-$18 million or more per year? I don’t. But NFL teams don’t really think in those terms, as weird as that seems. They just know that if you have a somewhat competent quarterback, you do whatever it takes to keep him around.
So when push comes to shove, history tells us the Redskins will pay whatever it takes to keep Cousins around. Is that the smart move? We’ll see.
Here are the rest of the winners and losers from Week 14 of NFL action:
WINNERS
Russell Wilson (oh, and Doug Baldwin, too): Wilson occupied the top spot in this post last week, and he deserves another mention this week. Wilson is the hottest quarterback in the league right now, and he had five more touchdown passes this week, the second time in three weeks he has thrown five scores. The Seahawks beat the Baltimore Ravens 35-6. Wilson has 16 passing touchdowns and no interceptions the past four weeks.
But Baldwin should get credit too. He has been playing just as well as Wilson, and had his third monster game in a row. Baldwin had three touchdowns, and has eight touchdown catches in Seattle’s last three games. Baldwin doesn't get a ton of credit, but he has been playing as well as anyone.
With running back Thomas Rawls out for the season with a broken ankle, the Seahawks will continue to rely on Wilson and the passing game for its offense. That has been a pretty good plan lately.
Khalil Mack: Mack had a great rookie season last year for the Oakland Raiders, but it resulted in just four sacks. Sacks aren’t the only measure of a player, but it was an oddly low number for a player who was universally loved by anyone who watched him play last season.
Mack is making up for lost time. He had nine sacks heading into Sunday’s game, then abused the Denver Broncos for five sacks in a surprising 15-12 upset win in Denver. If it’s possible he was even better than the five sacks indicate, because he seemed to be getting pressure every single play. Not that there were many holdouts on Mack already being an NFL star, but Sunday definitely announced his arrival in the elite.
Mack is clearly a defensive star, and it’s obviously now that he should have been the No. 1 pick in last year’s draft. He had an unbelievable day on Sunday, and it won’t be his last.
A potential Arizona-Carolina NFC title game: The last time Arizona and Carolina played in the postseason, it was awful. It happened just this past January, but I don’t blame you for entirely blocking it out of your mind. It was awful. The Cardinals, with Ryan Lindley at quarterback, were absolutely inept on offense, and yet Carolina still had a tough time putting them away.
A playoff matchup this season might be a classic. We’re getting pretty close to the possibility of a 17-0 Panthers team hosting an NFC championship game against a very entertaining Cardinals team. That would be one of the most fascinating playoff matchups we have had in a while. It would only be fair, considering those two teams gave us maybe the worst playoff game ever just 11 months ago.
Chip Kelly: We figure out yet which college job Kelly is taking after he gets fired?
LOSERS
Demaryius Thomas: Thomas got a five-year, $70 million deal last offseason, and nobody would or will say it wasn’t the right move. But Thomas hasn’t played anywhere near that contract lately. He had a ton of drops in a game the Denver Broncos ended up winning against the New England Patriots, and then had two killer drops on Sunday in what might end up being a killer loss.
Thomas had two huge drops as Denver lost 15-12 to Oakland. He dropped a short touchdown in the first half, and Denver had to settle for a field goal. Then Thomas had a big third-down drop in the fourth quarter. Not to be outdone, Vernon Davis had an incredibly bad drop, when he was wide open on fourth-and-5 with 3:45 left. A catch by Davis probably would have put the Broncos in field-goal range, or close. The loss might cost the Broncos the No. 1 seed in the AFC.
Thomas might be pressing a bit with the new contract, or he might feel a need to do more for an offense that has mostly struggled. But right now it seems he has the yips, because he has never had a huge problem with drops in his career. On Sunday, his drops really hurt.
Indianapolis Colts: Can you fire everyone and start over after a division title? We might find out with the Colts this offseason.
Indianapolis isn’t dead in the AFC South. Far from it. The Colts will likely win the division with a victory at home next week against the Houston Texans. But this isn’t a good team. Indy gave up 51 points in an embarrassing loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. The first few wins with Matt Hasselbeck seem like an oasis in a desert of terrible play this season. Andrew Luck’s absence hasn’t helped, but the Colts weren’t good with him this year either and it doesn’t fully explain the Jaguars hanging 51 points on them.
Indianapolis was a popular Super Bowl pick this season. The Colts might end up making the playoffs, but they’re not going to a Super Bowl. One has to wonder what changes await this offseason, even if they win the AFC South.
Marvin Lewis: You have to feel bad for the Cincinnati Bengals coach. Maybe he wasn’t going to get that elusive playoff win this year — they might not have beaten the Pittsburgh Steelers or Kansas City Chiefs or whoever they will face first even with Andy Dalton — but now he’s probably stuck trying to get it with his backup quarterback.
Lewis is famously 0-6 in the playoffs. Maybe AJ McCarron will bring home that win in January. But it looks like McCarron is the guy, since Dalton has a fracture in his thumb. Early reports said the Bengals realize that the injury is probably season ending.
The tough part is Lewis had done a tremendous job this season. The Bengals were the No. 1 seed in the AFC and Dalton was a top-five MVP candidate before Sunday’s action. That all changed when Dalton got hurt. But unless the Bengals pull off a playoff win with McCarron, or Dalton returns on a white horse from a bad injury and wins a playoff game, there won’t be any notation on Lewis’ career playoff record that this was the year he was supposed to win a playoff game. Nobody will really remember how unlucky he got.
Rex Ryan and the Buffalo Bills: I appreciate Ryan’s bravado, that he allows his real personality to come through and how emotional he is, win or lose. But sometimes it leads to some bad looks.
“This one’s tough because I thought we were the better team today,” Ryan said to start his press conference after his Bills lost 23-20 to the Philadelphia Eagles.
He later went out his way to credit the Eagles, and seemed to explain that he thought penalties killed his team’s chances. But when talking about the Eagles defense, he said, “I don’t know, that ain’t exactly the ’85 Bears, but if you want to say it is then go for it. It must have been them.” The grapes have gone sour in Buffalo.
Ryan has a unique style, but he opens himself up for criticism when his team has 15 penalties for 101 yards, like it did Sunday. Buffalo is second in the NFL with 124 accepted penalties, one behind Tampa Bay according to NFLPenalties.com. It shouldn't be too surprising when a team that acts like a bully on the block is the most undisciplined team in the NFL. The meltdown continued after the game. Joe Buscaglia of WKBW posted a video and said Ryan was not happy with the officials and in “their ear the whole way off the field.”
The Bills are practically out of the playoffs now, barring a miracle. The Bills dealt with a lot of injuries early in the season that set them back. But it wasn’t a pretty picture on Sunday, before or after the game.
Things are fairly good for the Washington Redskins right now. They’re in first place, albeit in a terrible NFC East. After some lean years in the nation's capital, nobody is complaining.*
But there’s a really difficult question coming that you know the front office is already wrestling with: What will they do with the Kirk Cousins contract situation?
Cousins is in the final year of his contract and will be a free agent in a few months. He got his first chance this season to be the full-time starter, after coach Jay Gruden finally had the opportunity to pull the plug on Robert Griffin III. And Cousins has done fairly well. He has been up and down, but overall the results have been solid. He has 18 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. Cousins had 300 yards in a 24-21 win over the Chicago Bears on Sunday, as Washington improved to 6-7 and remained in first place. Every game like that improves Cousins’ negotiating power.
NFL teams have a crippling fear of the unknown at quarterback. They’d rather dump a ton of money on a known mediocre option than try to start over. At this point, there’s no reason for Cousins to sign a team-friendly deal. He has gotten this far, so he might as well play it out and hit the open market, unless Washington really makes it worth his time to sign before mid-March.
Since free agency started in its current form, no good quarterback in his prime has ever hit free agency (unless the team had a backup plan in place, like Philip Rivers with Drew Brees, who was coming off a serious injury). If it ever does happen, there might be a frenzy among teams who are truly desperate at quarterback. Look at how many suitors Josh McCown had this past offseason. There are some general managers who don’t have a quarterback and understand they won’t be around to reap the benefits of developing a new one. This will surprise you, but NFL coaches and general managers often make less-than-ideal decisions in an attempt to save their own jobs. So if some GM had a choice of overpaying Cousins, who has a 93.2 rating this season, or waiting on a college prospect like Jared Goff or Paxton Lynch to bear fruit, you can probably guess what he’d choose.
This puts Cousins in a tremendous spot. He’s going to get overpaid. Even if you have a tremendous opinion of Cousins, he’s going to get overpaid based on what he has done. If you think Cousins is at best a middle-of-the-road NFL starter (I'm raising my hand) then he’s really going to get overpaid.
This puts the Redskins in a really tough spot. If Cousins thinks he can make $16 million per year — laugh if you wish, but that’s what Andy Dalton got per year on his deal before his breakout this season, and Dalton’s deal ranks 18th in average salary per season among NFL quarterbacks according to Spotrac — is that a good investment? Or do the Redskins just slap the franchise tag on him to get another year of evaluation? The franchise tag last year was $18.544 million. Wow. Cousins isn’t worth that. But it’s not like Washington can just tell Cousins how much he’ll make and call it a day. The market will determine his worth. Washington has to make a choice if it wants to pay that price.*
Then add in that Washington has won just one playoff game since the end of the 1999 season — that came in the wild-card round 10 years ago — and there’s a chance the Redskins win a fairly ridiculous division title in an awful division, and that complicates things even further. If any team is going to take a stand and not overpay a quarterback like Cousins before he hits free agency, it probably wouldn't be this Washington team coming off a division title.
Do you think you can build a championship team paying Cousins $16 million-$18 million or more per year? I don’t. But NFL teams don’t really think in those terms, as weird as that seems. They just know that if you have a somewhat competent quarterback, you do whatever it takes to keep him around.
So when push comes to shove, history tells us the Redskins will pay whatever it takes to keep Cousins around. Is that the smart move? We’ll see.
Here are the rest of the winners and losers from Week 14 of NFL action:
WINNERS
Russell Wilson (oh, and Doug Baldwin, too): Wilson occupied the top spot in this post last week, and he deserves another mention this week. Wilson is the hottest quarterback in the league right now, and he had five more touchdown passes this week, the second time in three weeks he has thrown five scores. The Seahawks beat the Baltimore Ravens 35-6. Wilson has 16 passing touchdowns and no interceptions the past four weeks.
But Baldwin should get credit too. He has been playing just as well as Wilson, and had his third monster game in a row. Baldwin had three touchdowns, and has eight touchdown catches in Seattle’s last three games. Baldwin doesn't get a ton of credit, but he has been playing as well as anyone.
With running back Thomas Rawls out for the season with a broken ankle, the Seahawks will continue to rely on Wilson and the passing game for its offense. That has been a pretty good plan lately.
Khalil Mack: Mack had a great rookie season last year for the Oakland Raiders, but it resulted in just four sacks. Sacks aren’t the only measure of a player, but it was an oddly low number for a player who was universally loved by anyone who watched him play last season.
Mack is making up for lost time. He had nine sacks heading into Sunday’s game, then abused the Denver Broncos for five sacks in a surprising 15-12 upset win in Denver. If it’s possible he was even better than the five sacks indicate, because he seemed to be getting pressure every single play. Not that there were many holdouts on Mack already being an NFL star, but Sunday definitely announced his arrival in the elite.
Mack is clearly a defensive star, and it’s obviously now that he should have been the No. 1 pick in last year’s draft. He had an unbelievable day on Sunday, and it won’t be his last.
A potential Arizona-Carolina NFC title game: The last time Arizona and Carolina played in the postseason, it was awful. It happened just this past January, but I don’t blame you for entirely blocking it out of your mind. It was awful. The Cardinals, with Ryan Lindley at quarterback, were absolutely inept on offense, and yet Carolina still had a tough time putting them away.
A playoff matchup this season might be a classic. We’re getting pretty close to the possibility of a 17-0 Panthers team hosting an NFC championship game against a very entertaining Cardinals team. That would be one of the most fascinating playoff matchups we have had in a while. It would only be fair, considering those two teams gave us maybe the worst playoff game ever just 11 months ago.
Chip Kelly: We figure out yet which college job Kelly is taking after he gets fired?
LOSERS
Demaryius Thomas: Thomas got a five-year, $70 million deal last offseason, and nobody would or will say it wasn’t the right move. But Thomas hasn’t played anywhere near that contract lately. He had a ton of drops in a game the Denver Broncos ended up winning against the New England Patriots, and then had two killer drops on Sunday in what might end up being a killer loss.
Thomas had two huge drops as Denver lost 15-12 to Oakland. He dropped a short touchdown in the first half, and Denver had to settle for a field goal. Then Thomas had a big third-down drop in the fourth quarter. Not to be outdone, Vernon Davis had an incredibly bad drop, when he was wide open on fourth-and-5 with 3:45 left. A catch by Davis probably would have put the Broncos in field-goal range, or close. The loss might cost the Broncos the No. 1 seed in the AFC.
Thomas might be pressing a bit with the new contract, or he might feel a need to do more for an offense that has mostly struggled. But right now it seems he has the yips, because he has never had a huge problem with drops in his career. On Sunday, his drops really hurt.
Indianapolis Colts: Can you fire everyone and start over after a division title? We might find out with the Colts this offseason.
Indianapolis isn’t dead in the AFC South. Far from it. The Colts will likely win the division with a victory at home next week against the Houston Texans. But this isn’t a good team. Indy gave up 51 points in an embarrassing loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. The first few wins with Matt Hasselbeck seem like an oasis in a desert of terrible play this season. Andrew Luck’s absence hasn’t helped, but the Colts weren’t good with him this year either and it doesn’t fully explain the Jaguars hanging 51 points on them.
Indianapolis was a popular Super Bowl pick this season. The Colts might end up making the playoffs, but they’re not going to a Super Bowl. One has to wonder what changes await this offseason, even if they win the AFC South.
Marvin Lewis: You have to feel bad for the Cincinnati Bengals coach. Maybe he wasn’t going to get that elusive playoff win this year — they might not have beaten the Pittsburgh Steelers or Kansas City Chiefs or whoever they will face first even with Andy Dalton — but now he’s probably stuck trying to get it with his backup quarterback.
Lewis is famously 0-6 in the playoffs. Maybe AJ McCarron will bring home that win in January. But it looks like McCarron is the guy, since Dalton has a fracture in his thumb. Early reports said the Bengals realize that the injury is probably season ending.
The tough part is Lewis had done a tremendous job this season. The Bengals were the No. 1 seed in the AFC and Dalton was a top-five MVP candidate before Sunday’s action. That all changed when Dalton got hurt. But unless the Bengals pull off a playoff win with McCarron, or Dalton returns on a white horse from a bad injury and wins a playoff game, there won’t be any notation on Lewis’ career playoff record that this was the year he was supposed to win a playoff game. Nobody will really remember how unlucky he got.
Rex Ryan and the Buffalo Bills: I appreciate Ryan’s bravado, that he allows his real personality to come through and how emotional he is, win or lose. But sometimes it leads to some bad looks.
“This one’s tough because I thought we were the better team today,” Ryan said to start his press conference after his Bills lost 23-20 to the Philadelphia Eagles.
He later went out his way to credit the Eagles, and seemed to explain that he thought penalties killed his team’s chances. But when talking about the Eagles defense, he said, “I don’t know, that ain’t exactly the ’85 Bears, but if you want to say it is then go for it. It must have been them.” The grapes have gone sour in Buffalo.
Ryan has a unique style, but he opens himself up for criticism when his team has 15 penalties for 101 yards, like it did Sunday. Buffalo is second in the NFL with 124 accepted penalties, one behind Tampa Bay according to NFLPenalties.com. It shouldn't be too surprising when a team that acts like a bully on the block is the most undisciplined team in the NFL. The meltdown continued after the game. Joe Buscaglia of WKBW posted a video and said Ryan was not happy with the officials and in “their ear the whole way off the field.”
Rex Ryan not happy with the officials after the game. In their ear the whole way off the field #Bills pic.twitter.com/oaawjizFZn
— Joe Buscaglia (@JoeBuscaglia) December 13, 2015
ESPN.com’s Mike Rodak identified Bills defensive coordinator Dennis Thurman in Buscaglia’s video as yelling at the officials in the tunnel, “You're a disgrace to the NFL!" Then LeSean McCoy, who was so vocal about Chip Kelly this week, left without talking to reporters after the Bills lost. — Joe Buscaglia (@JoeBuscaglia) December 13, 2015
The Bills are practically out of the playoffs now, barring a miracle. The Bills dealt with a lot of injuries early in the season that set them back. But it wasn’t a pretty picture on Sunday, before or after the game.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab