Welcome back to the Kirk Cousins Experience.
Good games are often followed by bad ones, though the praise for the positive tends to pale in comparison to the scorn for the negative.
Big moments are treated as opportunities, but they often lead to meltdowns.
And in the end, the wins and losses tend to even out — literally. After Monday's loss to the Eagles, Cousins is back to .500 as a starter over the course of 122 NFL games: 60-60-2, including 1-1 this year. He's never won more than 10 games in a regular season, and he's never lost more than nine.
With Cousins now in his eighth season as a full-time starter and fifth with the Vikings, the vast majority of football viewers are aware of all these narratives. And they unleashed some rather pointed critiques of Cousins in the wake of his three-interception mega-dud of a game that contributed significantly to Monday's 24-7 loss.
All three interceptions came in the second half and on plays that started inside the Eagles' 30 yard line, a particularly cruel confluence of facts that I talked about on Tuesday's Daily Delivery podcast.
The Vikings had a chance to position themselves as an early NFC contender and gain league-wide credibility, but instead the big-picture national reaction tended to focus on the struggles of Cousins.
There was this from Fox Sports Radio host Doug Gottlieb:
