INDIANAPOLIS -- Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot and coach Raheem Morris said Tuesday at the NFL scouting combine that the team was unaware quarterback Kirk Cousins was dealing with an injury late in the 2024 season.
Cousins said, on NFL Network during Super Bowl week, that he got hit in the Week 10 game with the New Orleans Saints and hurt his right shoulder and right elbow. The arm, Cousins said, never got back to where he wanted it to be the rest of the season.
The Falcons put Cousins on the injury report one day during Week 11, mentioning that he was limited in practice (a walk-through, specifically) due to a right shoulder and right elbow issue. Cousins chalked up that injury-report appearance to a "clerical error" when asked after Atlanta's Week 11 game with the Denver Broncos.
Beyond that single injury report, Fontenot and Morris said the organization was not in the know regarding Cousins' injury. The quarterback struggled after Week 10, throwing nine interceptions and just a single touchdown pass over the next five games.
"He was on the injury report that one week," Fontenot said Tuesday at the NFL combine. "When a player is injured, we put him on the injury report and that's the only time he was on the injury report. So as far as we're concerned, that's the only injury we're aware of."
Cousins was benched in Week 16, in favor of rookie quarterback Michael Penix Jr. The team said at the time that it was strictly a football decision, and that is what Morris maintained Tuesday. Morris said Cousins should be the one commenting on injury claims, and "for us, it was all about performance."
"The reason we made the change when we made it was because we had some bad decisions going along that way," the coach said. "It was well-documented. The interceptions that we threw was well-documented, the amount of touchdowns that we had at that point. And it was well-documented, the trust and the confidence I had for us to be able to bounce back, so we didn't do those things."
Fontenot said he would keep private any conversations with Cousins and his agent, Mike McCartney, since Cousins' injury remarks. The Falcons' philosophy in regard to Cousins, Fontenot said, has not changed: The plan moving forward is for Cousins to be Penix's backup.
If the Falcons release Cousins before the start of the 2025 league year (March 12), Cousins would not get a $10 million roster bonus and the team would get hit with $65 million in dead money, coming from his fully guaranteed base salary of $27.5 million and $37.5 million in remaining proration, per Roster Management System. If they do cut Cousins with a post-June 1 designation, the dead money would spread over the 2025 and 2026 season -- $40 million in 2025 and $25 million in 2026.
The Falcons' stance makes it seem like they would much prefer getting compensation back from trading Cousins rather than releasing him outright. But he has a no-trade clause, so he would need to approve any potential deal, and Atlanta would still likely have to eat a sizeable portion of his contract.
But Fontenot said keeping Cousins on the roster as Penix's No. 2 is still the plan, despite how much money is owed to the quarterback, who signed a $90 million guaranteed contract with the Falcons last season. The money had already been allocated to Cousins anyway.
"We understand that it's not ideal to have a quarterback at that cap number," Fontenot said. "Now, when we gave him that contract, the expectation was for him to be the starter at this point. And so that is a good number for a starting quarterback. But now that he's the backup, when we say we're comfortable, we're talking about the total funds allocated to the quarterback position, and that's already baked in."