Kirk Cousins had multiple reasons to sign with the Raiders. Some substantive, at least one superficial.
“Best jerseys in pro sports I think,” Cousins told the team’s website on Monday. “I remember being in warm-ups once playing the Raiders and our head coach looked at me and said, ‘Those have to be the best jerseys that they are in pro sports.’ And I said, ‘You know what Coach, I have to agree. Those are really sharp.’”
Cousins didn’t specify the team for which he was playing at the time. He has a 3-0 career record as a starter against the Raiders — one with each of his three prior teams.
In 2017, Cousins and Washington beat the Raiders, 27-10. In 2019, Cousins at the Vikings beat the Raiders, 34-14. In 2024, Cousins and the Falcons beat the Raiders, 15-9.
Despite getting the victory in Las Vegas on a Monday night in December 2024, Cousins was benched the next day for then-rookie Michael Penix Jr. Cousins didn’t play again that season.
Now, he’s on track to start for the Raiders in Week 1, unless the Raiders don’t make quarterback Fernando Mendoza the first pick in the 2026 draft and unless Mendoza wins the job right out of the games.
As to his observation about the silver and black jerseys (along with the rest of the uniform), it’s hard to argue. There’s a reason the Raiders’ look has resisted becoming Nikefied in the 14 years since the company took over the apparel deal from Reebok, when change for the sake of change swept through the league.
While the team has needed a fix that so far remains elusive, there’s nothing broken about the Raiders’ uniforms. They’re simple and classic. And they’ve never felt compelled to embrace numbers that look different from the standard football-jersey numbers that were once nearly universal in the NFL.
Raiders quarterback Kirk Cousins says he wanted to be a Raider because he wanted to play for new Las Vegas head coach Klint Kubiak.
Kubiak was Cousins’ quarterbacks coach for two seasons and offensive coordinator for one season in Minnesota, on a Vikings staff that also featured Raiders offensive coordinator Andrew Janocko and Raiders offensive line coach Rick Dennison.
“It starts with the coaching staff,” Cousins said in an interview published by the Raiders. “I was really excited to work with coaches I’ve worked with before in Klint Kubiak, Rick Dennison, Andrew Janocko. I had some of my best years playing with them. Coaching is a big deal in this league, so getting around them excited me. I think it’s a team that has a lot of young talent and they’re building something special, and I want to be a part of that.”
Cousins said Kubiak’s work with Sam Darnold last year in Seattle shows how good he is at helping quarterbacks play at a high level.
“I can talk about him all I want, but my actions really show what I think of him, by being here,” Cousins said of Kubiak. “Great football mind, hard working, there’s a humility there that I deeply respect. He’s a great question-asker who wants to do what the quarterback’s comfortable with.”
The in-house Raiders interview didn’t bring up the reality that Cousins is only a placeholder at quarterback in Las Vegas, where Fernando Mendoza is expected to be the first overall draft pick and future of the franchise. But at the moment, Cousins is the No. 1 quarterback on the Raiders’ depth chart, and as long as he has that role, he’s operating in an offense he thinks is a great fit for him.
The Vikings have not started their search for a permanent General Manager to replace Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.
The team fired Adofo-Mensah on Jan. 30, naming Rob Brzezinski as the interim G.M.
During the NFL’s spring meetings last week, Vikings owner Mark Wilf laid out the structure of the search.
He said, via Kevin Seifert of ESPN, that a “small, tight group” would advise the Wilf family on the decision, with “input” from coach Kevin O’Connell and chief operating officer Andrew Miller. A “third-party” will also participate in the search, although Wilf said the team won’t use a search firm or a formal consultant.
Instead, the Vikings will contract with a service to reduce an initial list of candidates.
The team won’t begin interviews until after the April 23-25 draft, with Brzezinski, a longtime executive vice president with the Vikings, helping O’Connell run the show.
“He’s done an outstanding job in terms of in the building, building consensus, strategy,” Wilf said, via Seifter.
The Buccaneers signed offensive tackle Justin Skule on Monday, the team announced.
Skule, 29, previously spent 2022-24 with the Bucs, appearing in 35 games with five starts.
He entered the NFL as a sixth-round pick of the 49ers in 2019, and he spent his first three seasons in San Francisco. Skule signed with the Bucs’ practice squad early in the 2022 season after the 49ers cut him.
Skule was with the Vikings last season, playing 16 games with nine starts. He saw a career-high 578 snaps.
In his career, Skule has appeared in 82 career games, including 26 starts.
Kirk Cousins has spent 14 years in the NFL. He’s been to the playoffs three times. He has one postseason win.
And he nevertheless sits near the top of the list of all-time NFL earners.
Depending on the source, Cousins is either second behind Matthew Stafford or third behind Stafford and Tom Brady. Once the latest $20 million is added to the total Cousins pile, he’ll likely become the undisputed No. 2.
And $20 million is a key number. It’s the bookend to the figure that sparked Cousins’s climb.
In 2016, Washington applied the franchise tag to Cousins, at $20 million, after his four-year, fourth-round contract expired. But they offered him a long-term deal with an average annual value of $16 million.
It made the decision a no-brainer for Cousins. Take the $20 million, show up for everything, and focus on having the kind of season that would lay the foundation for a long-term deal.
In 2017, Washington tagged him again, at $24 million. (Some in the organization at the time lobbied for Colt McCoy at $3 million, arguing that Cousins wasn’t eight times better than McCoy.)
As of 2018, Washington wasn’t inclined to give Cousins a 44-percent increase (by rule) for a third tag. He became a free agent and the highest-paid player in NFL history after the Vikings boxed out the Jets.
His initial three-year deal in Minnesota became a six-year stay. When the Vikings insisted on a year-to-year arrangement as of 2024, Cousins opted for the multi-year financial security in Atlanta, which (as he quickly learned) didn’t mean multi-year job security.
Through it all, Cousins kept adding cash to the pile. He got $98.7 million for two years with the Falcons. His new deal with the Raiders puts him north of $330 million.
It’s obviously a temporary title. As the NFL’s money increases, the salary cap will rise and the market at the various positions will, too. Inevitably, Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes will be No. 1 and No. 2.
For now, though, the biggest claim to fame for Kirk Cousins comes not from his exploits in the postseason, but from trips to the bank made in January and other months of the year.
