Cousins to start 2015 Season

[Skinsfanatic]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

Since this is the Cousins thread, back to Cousins.

I just wanted to get into the numbers a little bit in an effort to find as much hope as I could. It's well documented that last year when Cousins had a poor game, things REALLY went south on him, which Jay attributed to mental toughness. Well the one game that really went bad was the Giants game in Week 4 where he had the 4 INTs and lost another fumble.

So well then, how does he do when things don't go south? Is he competitive?

In the other 5 games in which he played, he averaged 21 for 34 for 291 yards, 1.8 TDs per game, 1.0 INTs per game, and 1.2 sacks per game. Extrapolate that over the course of a 16-game season and you get a projected starting QB line of:

342 for 547, a 62.5% completion rate
4,649 yards, 29 TDs, 16 INTs, and 19 sacks taken

Now of course this is extrapolating a 5-game sample size, and there's selection bias here because I'm removing the Giants game. But still I would take that performance happily, even though the 16 picks will still be among league leaders and mean we're only a mediocre team. Even with the picks, it would be positive progress at the QB spot.

So it seems Jay is onto something, getting Kirk past the mental hurdle of collapsing under adversity. If he's able to coach up that mental aspect of it, the Shanahans and Gruden both might be right in thinking he can be very good.

For fairness reasons, if you are going to extrapolate, you need to take out the best statistical game as well as the worst (the Eagles game), which leaves you with a season of:

4104 yards, 62.675% completion, 24 touchdowns, 20 interceptions.

This looks more like Kirk Cousins to me.