Pondering Her Percy wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2019 9:43 pm
J. Kapp 11 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2019 3:45 pm
This isn't going to sit well with some people, but I'd take Case Keenum back in an instant.
Say what you want about him ... he'd be an instant upgrade over Mannion as the backup quarterback. And he's won games in purple, something Kirk Cousins has yet to do, so maybe such a transaction would push Cousins to get his act together.
At some point, Kirk Cousins has to understand that the Vikings have a window, and right now he's the dirt on the glass.
I love ya Kapp and we agree on a lot but I can’t get behind you on this one.
I mean yeah he’s an obvious upgrade over mannion. I mean who fricken knows to be honest. If there was a Keenum type QB out there in 2017 before Bradford went down, would you be saying, “yeah I’d take him, he’d be an immediate upgrade over case Keenum”? Probably. I would. Because keenums career prior to 2017 was below average when starting or backup duties. So you never really know. And it’s just more reason for me to believe that keenums 2017 was a fluke. I know it was a fluke because he would have done something somewhere in his career to show he has something other than that one year. I don’t care what anyone says, that Denver team had some talent on it for sure. Especially in the first half of the season. And Keenum was 10tds:10ints. He was averaging over a pick a game. Sure there were things about keenums game that were good. Throwing the ball wasn’t really one of them IMO.
But I don’t see any possible way Keenum would have been anywhere near the same without pat shurmur. He would have crumbled in flips offense. Especially with the pressure on him to repeat the previous years success. He just simply wasn’t going to do it. And again, I don’t think we would have touched the playoffs with him last year. If he went somewhere else and proved he could at least do SOMETHING decent then you might have an argument but the fact that he blew last year and was benched this years shows me many were right about him, you just never know what player you’re going to get and more often than not, it’s not a good one.
And looking back, I’d still take cousins over case. Yeah case would have been way cheaper but if I’m in that GM chair, I go cousins any day of the week. And to be honest, how did cousins contract truly effect this team? We still were able to extend Diggs, Thielen, hunter and so on. Re-sign Barr. Didn’t lose any draft picks over it. I wouldn’t even say it forced us to take it easy in FA. We don’t overpay in FA very often. Spielman builds through the draft. Whether we signed Rodger Saffold or Josh Kline, it doesn’t make a difference on this OL and I think Kline has played halfway decent. So in the end, what did we really lose in two off seasons? Sheldon Richardson? Guys wanna complain about his contract but at the same time, it’s not really holding us back either. We would have still had Reiff (given cutting him would result in a ton of dead money at the time), Elflein would still be at guard, Bradbury would have still been picked, O’Neill would still be there. So maybe a slightly better RG? Saffolds PFF grade is barely higher than Klines. So we really didn’t miss out on much. Cousins didn’t set us way back and force us to get rid of half our team. We really lost the minimum.
It's interesting ... this thread is about Case Keenum, and if we can't agree that he had a GREAT 2017 season, then the conversation ends with me right there. He was an MVP candidate, plain and simple. Not the MVP, but a candidate. Go back and watch the highlights. He did things that season that Kirk Cousins has never done and never will do. It's just a fact. It's easy to linger on the so-called lucky plays. Go back and watch all the great plays, great throws, great reads, and great scrambles to move the chains (talking about picking up first downs with his legs). It's all there on YouTube. Sorry PHP, but you can't tell me, with any sort of intellectual honesty, that he didn't play his a$$ off in 2017.
So ... was 2017 an outlier? Would Keenum have been as good under somebody other than Shurmur? I think you have a point there -- I won't concede a "win," but a definite point. Pat Shurmur has always been a coach who tailors his offense to his players' strengths, rather than trying to shoehorn players into a system. He set Keenum up for success, no doubt. Even though any talk about what Keenum WOULD HAVE DONE or WOULD NOT HAVE DONE is pure speculation, it's not a bad argument.
But in my opinion, the real point of this conversation isn't Case Keenum at all. It's Kirk Cousins.
Nobody would even be mentioning the name Case Keenum if Kirk Cousins were doing what the Vikings paid him to do. Cousins has a reputation for piling up empty stats -- this year, he doesn't even have the stats. He's not doing his job, and he'd be the first to admit it. I mean, for crying out loud, the man apologized to Adam Thielen in a podcast. Do we really want the leader of our football team doing something like that in public? Mike Zimmer doesn't.
You say Cousins' contract isn't hurting the Vikings. I couldn't disagree more. The problem isn't the amount. It's the fact that all the money is fully guaranteed. What happens if Cousins is as bad the next month or six weeks as he was against Chicago? Think it can't happen? Look at the schedule. At KC. At Dallas. At Seattle. At Detroit, which just gave Patrick Mahomes all he could handle. What then? WE CAN'T CUT HIM. We can't move on. The dead money would kill us. We can't realistically even bench him. We're on the hook for $29.5 million this season and $30 million next season. That's about a sixth of the cap. Don't mean to go back to Keenum, but if we were paying Case 18-20 million dollars, you don't think that $10 million would make a difference? Maybe we could have made a play for one of the top O-linemen who were available.
Again, if Cousins were playing lights out, the contract wouldn't matter. But when he's taking up a sixth of our cap space and playing as the 31st ranked QB in the league, it's a big, big problem. You can blame the O-line, but not totally. I watched the coaches' film against the Bears. He had time on a lot of throws. He missed reads and open receivers. One play he had a huge pocket, completely clean. Rudolph was wide open 15 yards down the field on a crossing route, and Stefon Diggs was open for a TD deep, at least 5 yards behind the defense. But instead targeting either guy, he checked down to Mattison ... and didn't even set his feet to throw that pass. He was worried about a rush that wasn't there. That's dumpster-fire-category play.
My only point regarding Case Keenum is this ... if Case Keenum were still a Viking AND playing at the level he was playing in 2017, we'd be undefeated. Big if, I realize. But you'll never convince me the statement isn't true because Keenum was a stud in '17.
this will prob get things going.
. Both are clearly horrible and either Rick should be fired immediately for not finding the talent to make those units better or Zim should be fired for such a horrible job coaching. Or both. 
