The Vikings Scored Six Points Monday Night. Tuesday They Traded a Third-Round Pick for Kirk Cousins.
The Minnesota Vikings scored six points on national television Monday night. By Tuesday afternoon they had a new quarterback.
Minnesota is sending a 2027 third-round pick to the Las Vegas Raiders for Kirk Cousins, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter and NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport. Schefter posted it plainly: “Trade: The Raiders are trading QB Kirk Cousins to the Vikings, per @rapsheet and me.” Neither club had announced the deal as of this writing, and no public comment from Cousins, head coach Kevin O’Connell or general manager Nolan Teasley had surfaced.
Monday Night Made This Inevitable
Buffalo beat the Vikings 23-6 at U.S. Bank Stadium. Carson Wentz, starting because Kyler Murray is out with a strained hamstring, finished 8-of-25 for 81 yards with two interceptions and no touchdowns. He went 1-of-8 in the second half and lost a fumble near midfield.
Minnesota’s defense has carried this team all season. Monday it got nothing back.
Justin Jefferson was asked afterward whether Minnesota should trade for a quarterback. He did not bite. “Not sure. That’s on Nolan, that’s on KO. That’s their job,” he told reporters, per Will Ragatz of Bring Me The Sports. “My job is to continue to get open, continue to be the leader of the team, come next week and hopefully things change.”
Read that how you like. Jefferson also said “it doesn’t really matter who’s throwing the ball, as long as it gets there,” and he never asked for anyone’s job. O’Connell was less coy about where the decision sat: “I’ll defer to Nolan on that.”
Teasley did not defer.
What Minnesota Actually Bought
Cousins is 38 and this is his second tour in purple. He quarterbacked the Vikings from 2018 through 2023, going 50-37-1 across 88 starts, then spent two seasons in Atlanta before signing with Las Vegas in April. ESPN reported he started all nine Raiders games this season with 20 touchdowns against eight interceptions and a 64.1 percent completion rate.
Compare that to what Minnesota has been running out there. Murray has five touchdown passes and three interceptions in six games with an 86.6 passer rating, and ESPN had his QBR 26th of 30 qualified quarterbacks. Wentz has three touchdowns and two interceptions in three appearances at 48.4 percent. O’Connell called Murray’s hamstring “more than a week-to-week kind of thing” and ruled out injured reserve.
Cousins also already knows this building and this head coach. There is no install period, no learning a new verbal cadence in week ten.
The Defense Earned This
Minnesota is 6-2. Look at how: 9-3 over Chicago, 15-10 over Miami, 16-10 over Indianapolis, 23-16 at Tampa Bay. The Vikings have been winning games in which the offense does roughly nothing, and they held Buffalo down for long stretches Monday before the quarterback play buried them anyway.
A third-round pick is a reasonable price for not wasting a top defense. O’Connell took the blame for Monday himself, saying “Put tonight 100% on me” and “I should have run the football more.” Fine. He now has a quarterback who can complete a pass past the sticks.
The risk is obvious. Cousins turns 39 next August, he has changed teams three times in three years, and Las Vegas was willing to let him go for a third-rounder in the middle of a season he started every game of. The Vikings are not buying a franchise quarterback. They are buying ten weeks of competence, and competence would already have been worth about two wins.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
