Former scout: Better than 50 percent chance that Cousins leaves Redskins

If Washington does decide to move on from Kirk Cousins, what's Plan B?

Here’s the deal: If you have a top-10 quarterback entering the prime of his career, and you’re uncertain about paying him north of $20 million a year for the foreseeable future, you better have a backup plan. And it better be a substantially better backup plan than “Hey, let’s just sign Brock Osweiler and see what happens!”

This is the situation facing the Redskins, who went 8-7-1 with Kirk Cousins last season, but missed the playoffs. And while one of the knocks on Cousins is that he struggles with consistency, he also ranked third in total value among all quarterbacks last season, according to Football Outsiders’ metrics, behind only Matt Ryan and Drew Brees. We mention all this because Cousins reportedly won’t sign a long-term deal before the franchise-tag deadline, which is March 1 at 4 p.m. ET, which means the Redskins will have to commit some $24 million to the quarterback for the 2017 season. That, folks, is called leverage, something very few NFL players get to experience. So it makes sense that Cousins would tread cautiously here.

But here’s your monkey wrench: What if Cousins is traded? Sounds insane, right? But former Ravens scout Daniel Jeremiah, who now works for NFL Network, floated the idea on a San Diego radio station this week.

“I don’t think they’re going to be able to get a long-term deal done, and I think there is, I would say, a greater than 50 percent chance that he’s not with the Redskins next year,” Jeremiah said, via the Washington Post. “So you’ve got the combine coming up, all these teams will be together. I would not be shocked, at all, if we saw a Kirk Cousins to San Francisco trade go down at that point in time. And now you’ve got the Dominoes really starting to fall. …

“From what I hear, they’re not, in [Redskins Park], totally 100 percent sold on Kirk to give him the money that he could get,” Jeremiah said. “So I don’t think they come to a long-term deal, and I don’t think they can really afford to franchise him next year for a third year. So the feeling is hey, if we’re going to move on, we need to get something in exchange for him. And San Francisco would seem like the likely landing spot there. So we’ll see what happens.”

This brings us back to our original point: What’s Plan B?

Jeremiah continued: “If they believe in Colt McCoy like some people believe they do, they make that trade, they end up with the second pick in the draft. Might have to part with their own pick, no. 17, but they could wind up with the second pick in the draft. And then they have to decide if they want to draft one of these kids, or whether you go with Colt McCoy and just draft somebody else at that spot.”

This sounds like a terrible idea, partly because Colt McCoy, who by all accounts is a swell guy, isn’t a franchise quarterback, and partly because this quarterback draft class is considered average, at best.

But hey, things worked out fine the last time the Redskins ended up with the second-overall pick and drafted a quarterback.