The Las Vegas Raiders will be starting Kirk Cousins at quarterback in Week 1, and Klint Kubiak praised his leadership.
Moving up from offensive coordinator to head coach in the NFL comes with a lot of new job duties, and Las Vegas Raiders coach Klint Kubiak knows that. He’s mastering the art of passing out compliments to his two competing quarterbacks, and Kubiak has shown early on that he’s a quick learner who’s rapidly getting the hang of how this typically works.
The latest example of this is QB Kirk Cousins, who was signed a couple of months ago as the Raiders’ bridge quarterback. Everyone in the facility knows that Cousins will be starting in Week 1, but they also know that Cousins probably has a short shelf life as a starter because of the presence of newly-drafted Fernando Mendoza.
Cousins knows Kubiak’s offensive system, so he doesn’t exactly have a steep learning curve in this process. That means Cousins needs different compliments to be passed his way than the ones Kubiak issued this week about Mendoza’s question-asking process as the Raiders started their OTAs this week.
“Yeah, he’s a professional. He’s played a lot of football. He’s a leader that we’re counting on right now,” Kubiak told reporters on Wednesday in a piece written by Myles Simmons of Pro Football Talk. “You see that side of him when it gets competitive, that was fun to get that move the ball period and get guys off of scripts and see how they respond, and you see the fire come out, and that’s what I want from our guys.”
The truly tiresome part of all this is that Kubiak has to keep saying the same thing over and over again when it comes to his quarterback situation. Reporters are obligated to ask who the starter will be and when Mendoza will take over, and Kubiak’s duty is to deliver the same answer every time.
“It’s going to reveal itself, especially in training camp,” Kubiak said. “But it’s going to reveal itself here in these next how many do we have? Eight OTAs, these minicamp practices. But yeah, we definitely would [like to name a QB], but [we’ll] let the players figure that out for us with their tape.”
That’s not really the case, but what’s intriguing about this situation is what happens with the offensive line going forward. The Raiders have taken some impressive steps to rebuild it, with the most notable being the signing of center Tyler Linderbaum, but what if this unit isn’t ready for prime time in August given Cousins’ lack of mobility?
That’s when things could get really interesting, and it will be interesting to see how Kubiak does out preseason snaps to get a take on where his line is at. Last year it took a month into the season and the injury to left tackle Kolton Miller to make it clear how bad the line was going to be, and Kubiak could easily find himself in an analogous situation by early fall.
