Look Who Came Crawling Back To Kirk Cousins

Under any other circumstances, in any other year, Kirk Cousins being traded back to the Minnesota Vikings would be universally mocked under the You Can’t Make Someone Go Back Home statutes. The story of Kirk and the Vikes is one that had been told all the way through, in no great rush at that, and was on the merits not one that would have had the public demanding or even imagining a reboot. But here, now, in the situation in which the Vikings have placed themselves—well, put it this way: No NFL trade has ever had so many people call their shot ahead of time and then nod with approval after it came to pass.

Yes, even though Cousins already titillated and frustrated the Vikings alternately over six years by being Almost That Guy, they brought him back on Tuesday in a desperate admission that they had turned their quarterback room into a lividly radioactive dump site. Cousins, we must presume, went with a song in his heart, because he finally found his nirvana: a place without a young quarterback desperate to make his bones waiting to replace him.

A Cousins trade of some kind had been rumored from the moment he landed in Las Vegas to play for the Raiders, primarily because he was so obviously there to hold the place card until No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza was ready to replace him. Minnesota wasn’t much of a trade option until the Vikings made themselves one—well, the only one. After Cousins was lured to Atlanta (illegally, as the league eventually ruled), the Vikings fell in and out of love with J.J. McCarthy, fell briefly in like with Kyler Murray and then watched his hamstring explode, watched Carson Wentz melt into a puddle in real time on Monday night, and rejected Max Brosmer as a viable option on the fly.