Kirk Cousins is the new starting quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings after the team agreed with the Las Vegas Raiders to acquire the player that previously played six seasons in the Twin Cities.
So, Kirk Cousins … once and future Vikings quarterback.
This is a seismic move.
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The Vikings are sending a third-round pick to the Raiders in exchange for Cousins with the idea of making him their starter immediately. The club is expected to promote Cousins ahead of both Kyler Murray, who is currently nursing a hamstring injury, and Carson Wentz, who was wildly ineffective in a Monday night loss to the Buffalo Bills.
Cousins, who played for the Vikings from 2018 through 2023 – including two years under current coach Kevin O’Connell – is familiar with much of what the Vikings do on offense, so his arrival in Minneapolis should be as close to seamless as can be expected for any quarterback being traded to a new team in November.
This move at the NFL’s trade deadline on Tuesday, also has enormous ramifications for the Raiders beyond the compensation they’re getting for the deal.
It means that Fernando Mendoza, the No. 1 overall selection in the 2026 draft, is expected to become the Raiders starter as soon as this week against the Seattle Seahawks.
Mendoza getting his NFL regular-season debut against the defending Super Bowl champions is quite the way to start a career but the rookie has been sitting behind Cousins so far this season and the Raiders obviously felt he was ready to take the next step in his development.
So, the Vikings are getting what they believe to be quarterback upgrade in Cousins and the Raiders are getting draft pick compensation and the start of Mendoza’s career clock.
But here’s a warning to Vikings fans: the Kirk Cousins experience is a roller-coaster ride. There are a lot of ups and a lot of downs.
This season, Cousins has had four games in which he threw three touchdown passes in compiling 20 TDS and eight interceptions overall.
But there are also games in which Cousins reminds why the Vikings were comfortable letting him depart to the Atlanta Falcons in 2024. Last weekend against the San Francisco 49ers, Cousins threw three interceptions.
The Vikings see this as a necessary move because while they have a championship-caliber defense, their quarterback spot has been a mess, making winning with any consistency very difficult.
The Vikings can blame only themselves for their problems because they’ve been mismanaging their quarterback situation for some time.
The team’s quarterback problems seemingly began in the 2025 offseason, when Sam Darnold was not re-signed after his breakthrough 2024 season. He signed with Seattle and became a Super Bowl champion the following February.
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The Vikings for all intents and purposes handed their starting job to J.J. McCarthy because he was the team’s first-round pick in 2024, but he missed five games with a high-ankle sprain, later suffered a hand fracture, and finished with uneven production.
Minnesota came back this offseason with something of a quarterback competition between McCarthy and newly acquired Kyler Murray.
Murray, more experienced and with a history of producing, predictably won the quarterback job over McCarthy but what happened next was curious.
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The Vikings demoted McCarthy to being their No. 3 quarterback instead of making him the backup. That signaled the club, and particularly O’Connell, was effectively done with the former first-round pick.
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McCarthy was eventually traded to the New York Giants who wanted him because they lost starter Jaxson Dart to injury and replacement Jameis Winston played inconsistently in his place. Now, McCarthy is the starter for a New York team in the playoff hunt.
And the Vikings have seen their expectations of Murray go largely unmet. Murray suffered a concussion in the regular-season opener, injured his hamstring last week, and presided over an offense that ranked near the bottom of the league.
None of that mattered as the 4 p.m. ET trade deadline loomed and the Vikings turned to Cousins, whose job is to upgrade a Vikings’ offense that has been in search of a starter since he left in 2024.