There is a very clear soul search that takes place in the Atlanta front office. The organization's all-in bid for the Super Bowl ring saw Kirk's cousin fall to Earth and fall on the bench, with the team leaving to pick up the pieces for an 8-9 record.
Thankfully, this mess has two silver linings. Michael Penix Jr. has shown some flashes that he could become a future QB, and Raheem Morris has expressed his determination to make a tough call.
The downside is that GM Terry Fontenot is still in charge and Terry Fontenot is odd. On Tuesday, he held the Falcons Combine Week in Indianapolis with a focus on his cousin before things got weird. Fortenot cites the team wanting Penix Jr. to back up in 2025, claiming that the team plans to keep their cousins up next season. If it continues at home, this means Atlanta is committed to a $40 million cap hit. Their backup QB – But in reality there may be no choice.
At this point, it's unclear if anyone really wants to make his cousin his QB, especially due to his large price tag. Certainly, the Falcons can try to challenge him in the hopes of someone biting. This means Atlanta will have to pay a significant portion of its 2025 salary. So saying “We want him to be our backup” is a handy cover and a way to hedge bad bets. At the very least, holding a cousin seems to be not despair, but the intentionality behind it.
Maintaining a $40 million backup QB was not the strangest or even the most surprising part of Fontenot talking to the Indianapolis press. Instead, it's a debate about whether the team knew that their cousin had been injured.
Some highlights from Terry Fontenot's comments on the media this morning: – Comments on his cousin's injuries during Super Bowl Week were caught off guard by the team, he says. As a backup to Penix (displayed)
– falcoholic (@thefalcoholic.bsky.social) 2025-02-25T15:12:38.111z
My cousin has appeared Good morning soccer Until the Super Bowl In the 10th week he detailed how he was hurt against the saint.and the injury became a persistent problem with the quarterback stretch.
“I took a pretty good hit against the saint in my right shoulder and elbow. From there, I was working to get to where I really wanted it to be. I couldn't do it,” Cousins said.
Statistics will more or less back up your cousin account. Because it wasn't until after the game that he really fell off the cliff. Up until that point, he was thrown for nearly 3,000 yards, 17 touchdowns and seven interceptions. After the Saint's match, his average yards plummeted with each attatom, and his accuracy suffered, allowing him to throw one touchdown for nine interceptions. All signs refer to the fact that Cousins was injured in the remaining five games he played, but Falcon vows he didn't know he was hurt.
There are several issues with this excuse. That is, it doesn't make sense. It assumes that the cousin never told the team and that he was injured, and that no one questioned why he was struggling, and that the play calling changed dramatically after that saint game. The fact that he did shows a team trying to make plans around the injury.
Before the injury, Cousins ranked 14th in the NFL in average target depth (Adot). This is a metric that shows how deep theatre is called and how confident the team is in the QB's arms. Cousins' Adot fell sharply after an injury in the 10th week, averaging 27th in the league. It's just numbers, but this coincides with a QB who is struggling to throw the ball and a team trying to mask it.
So why is Falcon lying about his injuries now? Well, that just happens to them that they never put him on an injury report. Here's how Cousins was listed in the report after he said he was injured:
- Week 11: All participants (right shoulder, right elbow)
- Week 12: Not in the report
- Week 13: Not in the report
- Week 14: Not in the report
- Week 15: Not in the report
- Week 16: Not in the report
- Week 17: Not in the report
The reason why the Falcons did not report the issue to Cousins is a mystery. Perhaps they wanted to mask switching to Penix. Maybe they didn't want the other person to know that their cousin was injured. Either way, it goes against the NFL rules, and the Falcon knows that. The punishment for failing to report is the extent of the scope of the fine, the potential to the potential loss of repeated offender draft picks. The Falcons were fined in 2023 for not reporting Bidjan Robinson's injury prior to the Week 7 gameRobinson was restricted before revealing he was in a bad mood.
Therefore, history is not on the side of Fontenot and Falcon. As a result, Atlanta's GM was basically standing in front of reporters, and Kirk Cousins said he lied about his injuries (or at least withholding information from the team), and he was a $40 million backup. And I said it was okay.
The Falcon is as strange as hell.
