The 2024 season will result in Falcons quarterback Kirk Cousins facing his former team (actually, both of them). He’ll also face his former coach.
Mike Zimmer, the Vikings’ head coach when Cousins was signed, now serves as the Dallas defensive coordinator. The Falcons will host the Cowboys in 2024.
It could be spicy, to say the least. Zimmer and Cousins had a relationship that was strained, at times. Zimmer wanted Cousins to cut it loose more often, to play more aggressively.
“I want [Cousins] to keep doing it like he’s doing it,’' Zimmer said during what would be his final season in Minnesota, after Cousins cut it loose in a win over the Packers. “He can’t second-guess himself. If he throws an interception, that’s life. But you keep going for the jugular. It’s going to open up a lot of other areas in the running game. It’s going to open up other players.”
Cousins pushed back on that by saying, “When they want to call aggressive plays and tell me to take the ball down the field, I will. When they don’t, I won’t.”
The two men literally pushed each other after a come-from-behind win in October of that year against the Lions. Three weeks later, in a Sunday night loss to a Cowboys team that had Cooper Rush playing quarterback, Cousins was way too conservative for Zimmer’s liking. Cousins believed (to Zimmer’s great dismay, we’re told) that a careful approach with no turnovers would make a win more likely, since the Cowboys didn’t have Dak Prescott that night.
The Cowboys now have Zimmer. The Vikings have Cousins. And a Zimmer-Cousins reunion provides yet another game that has become far more interesting in light of today’s realignment of the league’s players.
