In a difficult football season, the most popular player is always the backup quarterback. I guess that means Kirk Cousins is the most popular guy in the eyes of Washington Redskins fans.With Robert Griffin III struggling with coming back from a knee injury that he suffered last season, the Redskins have plummeted to last place in the NFC East with a 3-10 record.
Head coach Mike Shanahan has shut down Griffin with three games to play, and has turned to Cousins to provide a spark and some momentum to carry over into next season.
Redskins receiver Santana Moss thinks that Cousins has been put in an unenviable situation, and says that he thinks Cousins is "being set up to fail". Not exactly words you want to hear from someone on your own team.
“It’s kind of tough to put him into this situation right now and hope for him to be excellent,” Moss said. “It’s almost like setting a guy up for failure. But you just want him to go out there and be at ease and just take his time, be as efficient as he can because it’s one of those situations that’s like, you know, Catch[-22].
"He don’t play as well, then you’re gonna say, ‘Well, should he have been in there?’ But you can’t do that to him because he hasn’t had all this season to go out there and jell with us. But he has been ready enough to go out there and be able to run this offense. So we’re just hoping for the best.”
As a backup you always have to be ready no matter what, but if Shanahan is looking for something positive to come from this he might be in trouble. Even though Cousins filled in admirably for Griffin last season, he might be a bit rusty for all the sitting he's done this season.
The silver lining in all of this is that the Redskins play the Atlanta Falcons, New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys the last three weeks of the season. Not exactly defenses that have performed well this year, so Cousins could possibly thrive which would ignite a quarterback controversy if Shanahan sticks around for next season (doesn't seem likely, though).
