At 3:40 p.m. local time Wednesday in Flowery Branch, Ga., an hour North of Buckhead, Kirk Cousins’s agent, Mike McCartney, was dropped off in front of the Atlanta Falcons’ facility. Twenty minutes later, the quarterback himself pulled in, timing his entrance for 4:01, and carrying a garment bag with a silver suit, white dress shirt, and shiny, solid red tie inside it.
Falcons coach Raheem Morris, flashing his trademark, 10,000-watt smile, was waiting, as was GM Terry Fontenot, and much of the Atlanta staff, to welcome their new franchise quarterback.
An hour later, after introducing him to folks around the building, Cousins was reunited with his wife, Julie, who arrived at Falcons headquarters on her own, from her parents’ place in Alpharetta, Ga. She had the couple’s sons, Cooper and Turner, with her in a conference room near Morris’s office—and, as little kids tend to do, they were busy generating general chaos.
Approaching the scene, McCartney smiled and assured Morris, “It’s not like this every day.”
“Mike,” Morris shot back, “Yes, it is, because I’m here. I’m the same way as these kids.”
It was a joke, of course. Viscerally, though, two points were illustrated.
One, the excitement in the Falcons’ building over landing their quarterback, just two months after Morris and his staff arrived, was palpable. And, two, the fit for Cousins and his family, at least as first days go, was promising to be every bit as good as he’d hoped it would be two days earlier, when he gave McCartney the go-ahead to push a four-year, $180 million contract with the Falcons over the goal line.
But just as it was a beginning for Cousins, it was also an ending to his six-year run in Minnesota, and a protracted, two-year negotiation with the Vikings. This was, for the quarterback and those around him, different than the last time, when he became a Viking after things disintegrated in the years leading up to his 2018 departure from Washington. He loved Minnesota. He was close with Kevin O’Connell. He had a really good situation football-wise, too.
There was no personal animus in his decision to leave. Simply, it was business.
And as much as Cousins’s arrival in Atlanta felt great—the same way landing in Minneapolis did six years ago—the good feelings Cousins had for the Vikings made it a tad bittersweet.
That said, he was ready for the next step, another chapter with years, plural, left in it.
In the end, that the Falcons were willing to go there with Cousins was his personal deciding factor.
So he’s ready to leave the past behind, and lead them. And we have the story of how he got to that point.
