If Kirk Cousins is going to be actually playing football in 2025, he's running out of realistic options in a hurry.
In fact, he might already be out of options, short of some team suffering a bad injury at some point in the preseason.
Cousins is one of the most prolific passers of the last decade in the NFL and is one of the wealthiest players in NFL history. He's going to join the $300 million club this coming year and will likely finish his NFL career in the top-five all-time when it comes to total money earned. Cousins has played the system extremely well, and even though he was benched last year in Atlanta, he could still be a starter for a few teams around the league.
The question is, does anywhere make realistic sense for him?
Kirk Cousins' most realistic options for 2025 are slim
The best possible situation for Cousins right now would probably be the New Orleans Saints, who just had their 2024 starter Derek Carr retire. But the Saints also happen to be in a bad salary cap situation and they are a division rival of the Falcons. The Falcons aren't going to do the Saints any favors.
The Falcons are on the hook to pay Cousins anyway, so they're going to make sure that if he's going to a different team, it's not going to hurt them at the same time. With that in mind, trading him out of the division is the only option, but what teams outside of the NFC South would really want Cousins right now?
The teams in the AFC with the shakiest quarterback situations would have to be the Indianapolis Colts (Anthony Richardson, Daniel Jones) and the Cleveland Browns (five different options). The Browns would be a nice landing spot for Cousins especially considering his connection to Kevin Stefanski from their time together with the Vikings, but they have four other quarterbacks already competing there.
They would have to decide in the near future that they were going to dump Joe Flacco and/or Kenny Pickett to make room for Cousins after drafting both Dillon Gabriel (3rd round) and Shedeur Sanders (5th round).
It's just becoming clearer by the day that Cousins is going to have to wait around for an injury while he collects a paycheck from the Falcons. And with limited time remaining on his NFL clock, the timing couldn't be worse for the music to stop on this game of musical chairs.
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