Pro Football Focus names Kirk Cousins as Most Underrated Viking

With the 2022 NFL Draft firmly in the rear-view mirror, it’s now time that we move into List-a-Mania season around the National Football League, with all sorts of rankings and ratings and what have you as everyone just tries to make it to the start of Training Camp.

Pro Football Focus has gotten the ball rolling by making a list of the most underrated player on each of the 32 NFL teams, and their choice for the Minnesota Vikings is one that will no doubt inspire nothing but calm, rational, level-headed reaction and analysis.

Yep. . .it’s Kirk Cousins.

By virtually any measure, Cousins has vastly outperformed any reasonable expectations the Vikings could have had for him when they signed him from Washington. He has been a consistent top-10 quarterback over that time and seems to be slowly improving with each passing season. This has tracked, unfortunately for him, with the Vikings falling away from contention as a real threat to win a Super Bowl, and so Cousins doesn’t get the respect his play deserves. He may never be one of the game’s truly elite passers, but he’s right at the top of the next tier, and most of the arguments thrown at him don’t hold up tremendously well to deep scrutiny. Over the past three seasons, including the playoffs, Cousins carries a 90.5 PFF passing grade — tied for fifth in the league.

It’s like they read the comments here or something.

Yes, I know, Kirk Cousins was brought in to be the last piece for a team that was on the verge of winning a championship and all that jazz. But after a rough first season with the Vikings, Cousins has actually been pretty damn good over the past three years. Over the past two seasons, through a combination of injuries and attrition, we’ve seen the defense disintegrate into a shadow of what it once was, which is a much bigger reason for the Vikings getting farther away from contention than the play of Kirk Cousins.

The Vikings are likely going to have Cousins as their starter for the next two seasons (at a minimum), and it certainly doesn’t seem as though the offense is the part of the team we need to worry about at this point. They’re more than capable of moving the football and scoring. If the defense can stop being awful for a while and the Vikings can get some more victories, it’ll probably be time for PFF to move Cousins off of the “underrated” list.