Here’s Why Kirk Cousins Of The Minnesota Vikings Is Ninth On The 2020 Forbes List Of World’s Highest-Paid Athletes

Several light years ago, professional sports teams paid athletes more for their performance than their potential.

Then it became performance and potential.

As for the present, well, um.

If you needed to win an NFL playoff game right now, how many of these quarterbacks would you take over Kirk Cousins, ninth on the 2020 Forbes list of the world’s high-paid athletes?

Yeah . . . ninth.

Here are those other quarterbacks: Russell Wilson, Patrick Mahomes, Drew Brees, Ryan Tannehill and Lamar Jackson.

Hold your answer, and consider this: If you go in order by the grading system of Pro Football Focus, which analyzed every play of NFL quarterbacks from the 2019 regular season through the playoffs prior to the Super Bowl, Wilson, Mahomes, Brees, Tannehill and Jackson ranked ahead of Cousins, the $60.5 million man last season during his second year for the Minnesota Vikings.

Yes, Cousins became more prolific during one of his six seasons through 2017 with the Washington Redskins than Sammy Baugh, Sonny Jurgensen, Doug Williams and the rest. That’s when Cousins threw for a franchise-record 4,917 yards in 2016, and he finished the following year with 29 touchdown passes, the second-most during a season for a Redskins quarterback.

Yes, even though the Green Bay Packers crushed the Redskins 35-18 in January 2016 during Cousins’ only playoff game for Washington, he completed 63% of his passes for 328 yards.

Yes, Cousins did much last season to help the Vikings shock the Saints in New Orleans for a 26-20 overtime victory in an NFC wild card game.

There’s everything else, though.

After that Vikings upset, the 49ers made Cousins look mediocre during a 27-10 beatdown of his team in San Francisco.

Ever see Cousins’ record involving prime time and playoff games? Not good. It’s 8-16, and that doesn’t include his vanishing act during each of the Vikings’ two losses last season to the Packers, their most prominent foes in the NFC North.

I’m guessing Cousins wouldn’t be your No. 1, No. 2 or even No. 4 pick for that playoff game among those previous choices.

That said, if you don’t include three iconic soccer players (Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Neymar), a current and a former star of the Golden State Warriors (Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant), some guy named Tiger Woods and another one named LeBron James, only Roger Federer sits above Cousins on that Forbes list of last year’s money elite.

It’s nuts, you say?

Nah . . .

It’s potential over performance.

It’s the importance of quarterbacks in the modern pass-happy NFL over every other position (according to Forbes, seven of the highest-paid players in the league last season were quarterbacks).

It’s the NFL prospering so much through television, sponsorships and clicks at the turnstiles that it generated a record $16 billion last season — as in, owners have enough loot to gamble and lose, and then to gamble some more.

It’s free agency.

For perspective, let’s return to a year within that era of performance over potential. Like 1990, which was a couple of seasons before the NFL went from teasing with free agency by ousting the “reserve rule” in 1947 and later the Rozelle Rule in the early 1960s to the mostly wide-open player movement of today.

After that 1990 season, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana won the second of his two NFL Most Valuable Player awards. He was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. He made the seventh of his eight Pro Bowl trips. His 49ers lost a defensive classic to the New York Giants in the NFC Championship Game, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t already have four Super Bowl rings.

So the 49ers rewarded Montana for his decade’s work in the San Francisco Bay Area by making their future Pro Football Hall of Famer the first NFL player ever to make an average of more than (wait for it) $3 million per season.

Cousins is no Montana.

That’s on the field and at the bank.