Falcons’ Kirk Cousins makes history in clutch breakout vs. Buccaneers, continuing a new prime-time trend

Week 5 of the 2024 NFL season kicked off Thursday with all kinds of quarterback acclaim, both past and present: Atlanta Falcons great Matt Ryan officially entered the team’s Ring of Honor, and visiting Tampa Bay Buccaneers captain Baker Mayfield made another gutsy plea for early season MVP consideration, shining as both a scrambler and thrower en route to a would-be 4-1 start atop the NFC South. And yet, in the end, Thursday night’s prime-time showdown belonged to another quarterback entirely: Kirk Cousins.

Three weeks earlier, the Falcons’ prized offseason addition stole the late-night spotlight with an effortless game-winning finish against the favored Philadelphia Eagles. It proved to be a shiny blip in an otherwise muddy start to Cousins’ tenure as Atlanta’s new signal-caller, with the Falcons offense entering Thursday’s divisional contest ranked just 19th and 21st in yards and points per game, respectively.

Thursday was different. A definitive coming-out party for the Cousins offense, if you will. Yes, the Buccaneers were down two key starters in Calijah Kancey and do-it-all safety Antoine Winfield Jr. That doesn’t mean Todd Bowles’ defense was going to be a cakewalk, entering the NFC South battle as a top-10 scoring unit, fresh off a suffocation of the Eagles, and more primed to bring extra pressure than just about any team — not exactly an ideal matchup for an aging, physically limited pocket passer.

Tell that to Cousins. Even while maintaining his signature stationary posture of 2024, preserving his 36-year-old surgically repaired Achilles as best he could, the former Minnesota Vikings veteran performed a surgery of his own, rifling one tight-window dart after another to the ultimate tune of 509 yards — the most thrown by any quarterback this season, or by Cousins in his eight-year career, or by anyone in Falcons history. His fourth and final touchdown, a pinpoint walk-off bullet, helped make a hero out of injury sub KhaDarel Hodge, and it might’ve reignited all hope for what the 2024 Falcons can be.

If Cousins, after all, can be this “limited,” yet this precise, this resilient, this game-changing as a crunch-time distributor of the football, obviously elevating pass catchers like Hodge and Drake London and Darnell Mooney, then it’s no wonder the Falcons paid a pretty penny to secure his services back in March. This isn’t the Kirk Cousins of old, friends; you know, the one who makes the rounds on social media not as a prime-time darling but a run-of-the-mill meme, forever ridiculed for bright-light hiccups.

His 11 game-winning drives since the start of 2022 are — get this — the most among all quarterbacks, per CBS Sports research. Since then, he’s also 9-5 against teams with a winning record, and 2-0 as a “Monday Night Football” underdog the last two seasons, upsetting the eventual NFC champion San Francisco 49ers with a near-flawless 2023 showing. And he’s now the first quarterback to ever throw 450 yards in a game for three different teams: the Falcons, Vikings and Washington Commanders.

That’s not to say Cousins has been invulnerable; half his final season with Minnesota, remember, was lost due to injury, and he’s still in search of a defining postseason stretch, nearly sliding to 2-3 to start 2024, had Mayfield’s supporting cast simply controlled the ball late. But a monster showing when it mattered most on Thursday, in front of a crowd still drying tears from memories of Matt Ryan’s big-time career, staring down a deeper hole in the ultra-tight South? Thirty-six points, all kinds of impressive ball placement and, most importantly, a well-earned “W” will do.