Kirk Cousins ​​earns Week 5 MVP honors

In Week 1, Kirk Cousins ​​had an anemic start to his career with the Atlanta Falcons, throwing for a meager 155 yards with one touchdown and two interceptions. He seemed cautious, the game plan didn’t seem to suit him, and a slight panic spread among the fan base early on.

Patience, we were told, and things got better. Cousins ​​looked shaky in Week 2, but put it all together in the end for a 241-yard, two-touchdown performance. In Weeks 3 and 4, he threw for a total of 468 yards and a touchdown against two picks. Although it wasn’t a particularly tangible improvement statistically, Cousins ​​started to move a little better and seemed more comfortable on offense. Patience.

That patience paid off in unexpected, phenomenal ways against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Cousins ​​shot and acted like an old Kirk Cousins, proving that the Kirktober moniker is appropriate. He fired and didn’t stop until the game was won. When his day was over, Cousins ​​had thrown the ball 58 times, despite an unsuccessful ground game and the need to pull his team back from the brink, and he finished the game with a franchise single-game record of 509 yards and four touchdowns. There were mistakes, including a fourth-and-long interception and a few errant throws, but very rarely is a quarterback perfect. cousins ​​​​was fantastic.

As expected, he’s also the Falcons’ MVP this week. On a day when the Falcons allowed 24 points in the first half and could have been eliminated from the game entirely with a weaker performance from Cousins, he absorbed sacks and watched a few tough drops from Darnell Mooney without batting an eyelid to twitch and keep going back to Drake London and Mooney while still distributing the ball. He out-rebounded the Falcons in that game, proving that all we needed was patience.

I wrote after every game this year that I fully expected Cousins ​​to return to form at some point, but I wasn’t sure if it would be this soon or this far The form. Even if he doesn’t pass for 500 yards every week, the Falcons will be tough to stop if they can hit Cousins ​​with such sharpness and precision on a regular basis.