“If you believe in a quarterback, you have to take him, and if he sits for four or five years, that’s a great problem to have because we’re doing so well at that position.”

That’s what Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot said about rookie quarterback Michael Penix Jr. when he shocked the NFL world by drafting him with the No. 8 overall pick in April, mere weeks after signing veteran quarterback Kirk Cousins to a four-year, $180 million contract.

Unfortunately, Fontenot and the Falcons won’t have that problem. Fifteen weeks into Cousins’ first season in Atlanta, he has been benched for his performance, and the franchise is turning the keys over to Penix.

The 7-7 Falcons are still in the NFC South hunt, but their lead on the division crumbled during a 1-4 stretch in which Cousins threw only one touchdown pass to nine interceptions and took 11 sacks. They had high aspirations for this season; remember, coach Raheem Morris also said that “we won’t be picking this high again,” in reference to the eighth overall pick that secured Penix. But with the 36-year-old Cousins at the helm, they were clearly going to fall short of a playoff berth.

The sprint to Penix this late in the season is a desperate scramble for immediate improvement with a resource that was initially viewed as a long-term investment. The Falcons are drawing out of their 401(k) to pay off their credit card bill. But Penix was burning a hole in their pocket. That’s the struggle with the ever-patient draft-and-develop approach — organizations are always wondering what’s behind Door No. 2.

Put aside the long-term vision and larger ramifications. Why was it so clear that Cousins needed to be benched? And can Penix really step in and immediately help the offense as a rookie? I have faith this will work. Maybe not well enough to beat the Buccaneers for the division, but it could pay off in time. Here’s why the Falcons made this move.

Jump to a section:
Cousins hasn’t looked right all season
How will Penix change the offense?
What’s next for Cousins?

Why did Kirk Cousins need to be benched?

There are a few things NFL teams need their quarterbacks to do that Cousins was simply not physically capable of doing this season. The first is move. Watch this handoff attempt against the Raiders on Monday night.

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— Good Clips (@MeshSitWheel) December 18, 2024

This has been an issue for Cousins all season. He struggles to get to the appropriate marks on handoffs. It’s one of the reasons the Falcons put him in the pistol, as you see here, as opposed to under center, where the quarterback traditionally aligns in this Rams-inspired offense. Atlanta has been in the pistol on 36.5% of its snaps this season, the fourth-highest rate for any season in the NFL Next Gen Stats database (since 2016).

Cousins simply lacks any springiness, and he wasn’t necessarily the most spry quarterback before his Achilles injury in October 2023. This immobility affects everything about the offense — not just handoff timing. It affects his pocket depth, which changes how his offensive line pass protects, how the team executes screens, the precision of timing routes with his receivers and the plays even available for the offense to call in the first place. The Falcons run more outside zone rushes than any other offense, but the beauty of the outside zone is the accompanying play-action rollout, and they are totally cut off from that arm of the playbook by Cousins’ limitations. He has 11 designed rollouts on the season, and his average speed at the release of the football is 2.43 mph. Only 2017 Ben Roethlisberger moved less in any season since 2016.

Cousins has been a play-action merchant for much of his career, but those plays haven’t been available to him in Atlanta. He just doesn’t get through the dropbacks quickly enough. Watch this under-center play-action fake against the Chargers from earlier this month. By the time he lands on his back foot and comes to balance, ready to throw, wide receiver Drake London is already in his break. Cousins is already late to this throw, and with pressure off his right side and the Chargers sinking into the throwing window, he’s uncertain if he should uncork this ball.

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— Good Clips (@MeshSitWheel) December 18, 2024

A physically capable quarterback would take one of two options. First, he can hammer this ball into the window with velocity and hope London makes the play at the catch point. Not a bad bet, as that’s what London does best. Second, the quarterback can eat this throw and immediately scramble to the right. It’s only a three-man route concept, so there should be plenty of space to the right for at least a moderate gain.

Neither option is available to Cousins. He double-clutches because he knows he can’t make this throw, but he never considers running, because he can’t do that either. So he heaves up a prayer for London, and it’s so slow that Chargers cornerback Tarheeb Still has all the time in the world to leap in front of London to secure the pick.

Because Cousins lacks any explosive ability in the pocket, he has had no answer against pressure this season. He could not scramble — he has done it exactly once on 115 pressured dropbacks. But even quarterbacks who don’t scramble can still extend the play by resetting in the pocket. Not Cousins. His time to throw when pressured is 3.36 seconds, the second-fastest among quarterbacks this season. His air yards when pressured are the seventh lowest. If he feels the heat, the ball has to come out now — and that’s an advantage for the defense.

Cousins has had so much trouble driving the football this season that he ends up spraying a lot of those attempts. He has to use his whole body to put any sort of velocity on the ball, and his mechanics deteriorate as a result. This issue was more frequent earlier in the season — I wrote about it in Week 5 — and has diminished over time. He cannot reliably drive the football anymore.

Watch this throw from Week 4, again on a under-center play-action fake. Cousins’ entire body is required to deliver this fastball to London, and it still isn’t fast enough or accurate enough to keep it away from the defensive back. Cousins was so hesitant to put weight on his right leg early in the season (and remains tepid to this day) that reps such as this one, with bad mechanics, continue to occur.

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— Good Clips (@MeshSitWheel) October 2, 2024

Cousins has throttled the Falcons’ offense with his physical limitations. It isn’t any one thing — there are plenty of immobile quarterbacks who have made it work in past seasons, and plenty of veteran quarterbacks have worked around diminished arm strength. But the cumulative weight of his limits has put this offense in a bottleneck. Offensive coordinator Zac Robinson has been operating from a highly limited menu that has become stale and predictable, and even when the Falcons win on the chalkboard, their quarterback doesn’t always execute.

This brings us to the next question: What happens to the Atlanta offense when Penix steps in?

What will change in the offense with Penix?

I think the improvement is going to be immediate and noticeable. It won’t necessarily be because Penix is Penix, but rather because Penix is not Cousins. The Falcons could stick Joshua Dobbs back there and still get some much-needed relief.

The first thing we will see is an increase in boot-action and rollouts. These are the natural extensions of the outside zone running game, in which the Falcons major. In the five years Robinson was on the Rams’ coaching staff, they never had a quarterback roll out less than 8.5% of the time — and that was when they were moving away from outside zone and toward a more downhill rushing attack. The boots are coming back in Atlanta, where their horizontal stretch will be maximized.

Penix isn’t a particularly mobile quarterback. He ran a sub-4.6-second 40-yard dash at the Washington pro day this spring, which is impressive. In college he wasn’t much of a scrambler, tucking and running on only 22 of 1,147 dropbacks over his two seasons as a Husky. But remember, the Rams were using rollouts with Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford — that’s the whole point. Quarterbacks don’t need to be excellent movers to maximize the boot. They just need to be functional, and Penix certainly is.

The boot-action will also help cut the field in half for Penix, which will simplify reads and coverages — something we love for rookie quarterbacks. Cousins has seen a lot of full-field, three-step dropbacks that require him to process the way only a seasoned vet can — it would be foolish to give Penix, or any rookie quarterback, the same burden. Penix was an excellent point-and-shoot quarterback at Washington; he played with three NFL receivers in Rome Odunze, Jalen McMillan and Ja’Lynn Polk and had no issue delivering accurate passes downfield in one-on-one situations. But we should expect his transition to NFL play to be rocky — bad missed reads, late throws, inaccuracy — because the Falcons don’t dramatically outclass their opponents the way Washington did at the college level. This game is played at a different speed.

Still, we were already seeing bad misses and late throws from Cousins. Penix hasn’t been given the reins to make fewer mistakes than Cousins. In fact, he’ll probably make more. But he can also create more positive plays out of negatives. He can escape pressure and sacks, throw off-platform and reintroduce core concepts to the offense. He’s additive simply in that he isn’t subtracting.

To that end, it will be interesting to see what changes in the designed passing game for the Falcons. Consider that 19.6% of Cousins’ throws went into tight windows this season, the fourth-highest rate in the NFL. Morris and Robinson do not want a rookie quarterback attempting a similar rate. Penix doesn’t have the chemistry with London, Darnell Mooney or Kyle Pitts yet to willingly throw it to them when they’re covered. And even if he does, those are challenging throws to deliver accurately, snap after snap. Caleb Williams and Bo Nix both have below-average tight-window rates this season; Drake Maye and Jayden Daniels are right on average. Rookies shy from tight windows in favor of open checkdowns as they adjust to the speed of the NFL.

Robinson must do far more for Penix than he has for Cousins in terms of scheming open receivers. Mooney has feasted on vertical routes that break far downfield, but he might need to take a few more screens and shallow crosses. Running back Bijan Robinson must be used in the dropback game as a checkdown option to give Penix an easy completion that might turn into an explosive one. Since Cousins didn’t need much help diagnosing coverages pre-snap, Robinson would use motion right at the snap to give receivers running starts or advantageous leverage. Now, he’ll need to use shifts to give Penix pre-snap tells before the cadence even begins.

Again, almost independent of the quality of Penix’s play, the reintroduction of easy buttons like boots and underneath targets will make the Atlanta offense more difficult to defend. The run game should improve once Penix establishes the threat of the boot. The interception rate should fall (as should the sack rate), which will help the field position battle. If Penix has a rocky few weeks, there will still be back-breaking plays — but hopefully fewer, with better plays in between.

What’s next for Cousins?

The future for Cousins rests in his right Achilles, and just as the Falcons didn’t know much about his recovery in the spring of 2024, I don’t know anything about how it’ll look in the spring of 2025. As a general rule, I’d never take the risk of a 36-year-old quarterback (turning 37) who has already struggled to return to form following that major injury. But some team is going to take the risk.

Cousins’ four-year deal has real guaranteed money in only the first two seasons. As such, Cousins represents a $40 million cap hit next year, all of which is guaranteed. If the Falcons cut him in the offseason with a post-June 1 designation, he’d hit the 2025 cap for all that $40 million in dead money, and then another $25 million in dead cap for 2026.

So it would cost as much in both 2025 and 2026 to employ Cousins as it would to cut him, which makes an outright release pretty unlikely. Why would Atlanta release him when it could keep him as QB2 in 2025 and then release him in 2026 for the same price? Well, if Cousins wants the chance to start somewhere, he might refuse to hold the clipboard for Penix next season. If that ends up being the case, Cousins could either hold out and try to force a release, or he could waive his no-trade clause.

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Stephen A.: This will be Kirk Cousins’ last year in Atlanta

Stephen A. Smith is critical of Kirk Cousins after another lackluster performance in the Falcons’ win against the Raiders.

Were Cousins traded at the start of the 2025 league year, another team would take on his $27.5 million in base salary, and the Falcons would take only $37.5 million in total dead cap (all in 2025) as opposed to the $65 million they’d otherwise take over two years. It’s certainly the preferable outcome for the Falcons’ checkbook, and I’d imagine they’d trade Cousins for meager draft capital accordingly.

At a cheap price (Day 3 pick), there will certainly be suitors. The Jets, Giants, Titans and Raiders will all need a quarterback next year, and the Panthers, Colts and Steelers could be on that list, as well. Though Cousins’ film is far from encouraging, he has shown he can keep a passing game afloat even at his lowest. And what if he’s a little healthier next season?

I’d be surprised if Cousins is a Falcon in 2025. He wasn’t stoked about the Penix pick at the time, so I don’t see him staying to help the young kid develop. If he still wants to start, he only has a few years left to do it. My guess is that he gets traded for a pittance and lands with a team that has a young passer and is willing to let Cousins compete for the gig. No matter where he lands, I won’t have high expectations for his play until I see him move a little better.