How bad was Kirk Cousins' late-season injury? Was there an injury at all? Only one person knows the answer, said Atlanta Falcons head coach Raheem Morris, and it's Kirk Cousins.
"You have to ask those kind of questions to him," Morris told 92.9 The Game's Andy Bunker and Randy McMichael Tuesday.
Cousins was benched prior to Week 15 in favor of rookie Michael Penix Jr. The move was viewed as performance-based until Cousins went on TV in February and claimed he suffered a shoulder injury against New Orleans on Week 10.
Cousins was only on the injury report one week. Other than being listed on that injury report, he played in the next four games, during which he had eight interceptions and zero touchdown passes.
"When you're on the injury report, you're on the injury report," Morris said. "When you're not on the injury report, you're not on the injury report. And you got to have some metrics and some people behind you with your Player Performance Program and to be able to go out there and find out if guys are being able to be consistent and help you win football games.
"And you got to make decisions out there every single day, whether the guy's healthy, whether they can go or can't go. And we made those decisions based on the information that we had. And if there is anything else, those are all questions that have to go to Kirk and have to be answered by Kirk and Kirk only.”
Morris explained the process of making decisions based off injury information, and said the team had to pivot last year.
"We were out there together for a long time, for a bunch of weeks that we talked about and watched him go out there and practice to get all the things done that we wanted to get accomplished," said Morris about Cousins on the practice field after Week 10. "And we felt really good about those things going into games. And the reasons you have to make some of those changes and make those decisions is because the decision making wasn't the right way, and we had to make the change because of that."