Falcons' lack of awareness of Kirk Cousins injury a troubling sign for team, quarterback

The Kirk Cousins saga in Atlanta took an unexpected and troubling turn at the NFL Combine on Tuesday.

Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot and head coach Raheem Morris both told reporters they were unaware of Cousins' lingering elbow and shoulder issues that he said plagued him for most of the latter half of the year, according to ESPN's Marc Raimondi.

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"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."

Morris reiterated that Cousins' benching was strictly performance related, and said that the quarterback should be the one commenting on injury issues.

"The reason we made the change when we made it was because we had some bad decisions going along that way," Morris 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."

During the week leading up to the Super Bowl, Cousins gave an interview in which he said his arm issues plagued him starting in Week 10's game against the New Orleans Saints.

"Nobody is perfect in this league. We're never feeling 100%," Cousins told Erdahl. "[The achilles] didn't really affect me too much. But then against the Saints, got hit pretty good in my right shoulder and elbow. From there, kind of dealing with that was something I was working through."

"Just never could really get it to where I wanted it. Now that the season, you have the time and energy to say, 'Ok, let's get the right ankle back, let's get the right shoulder back, let's get the elbow back.' And if we can do that, feel like I have a new life ahead of me in pro football."

There are two possible things happening here, and neither one is good. Either the Falcons ignored Cousins' discussions of continued pain in his throwing arm, and continued to trot him out there for another five weeks without any injury notation (and possibly without further treatment), or Cousins didn't feel the need to inform Atlanta that his arm was bothering him .

The first of those possibilities implies a troubling level of organizational mismanagement from Fontenot and Morris. Being unaware your quarterback is still hurting or not 100 percent and still running him out there is not exactly the kind of things well-run organizations do.

But the second of those options is almost as troubling. If Cousins was hiding the fact that he was hurt from the team, it begs the question of why. Certainly, he knew he hadn't played well, and was concerned about his job, but at the same time, it's a sign that he didn't trust the Falcons not to bench him for good, or to handle the injury correctly. Given the size of the contract Cousins got from Atlanta last offseason, that's a troubling sentiment to say the least.

It should go without saying that your team should have a good idea of what's going on with your franchise quarterback from a physical perspective, and that that quarterback should trust your coaching staff and organization enough to tell them how his arm is feeling.

On top of that, knowing Cousins was playing hurt likely would have changed the team's calculus about when to switch from him to Michael Penix Jr., and could have given Cousins a longer runway into the trade market this offseason.

While the quarterback's tenure with the team appears to be coming to a close, knowing that the Falcons were unaware of his health issues sould trouble players wanting to head to Atlanta.

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