When you look at sports morning shows that have multiple people on a panel talking about a specific topic, sometimes the person who goes last has the chance to access the most information before they have to speak. That happened on Wednesday morning on Get Up when Mike Greenberg, Dan Orlovsky, Adam Schefter, and Ryan Clark got into Kirk Cousins’ recent comments about COVID-19.
Cousins was on Kyle Brandt’s 10 Questions podcast on Spotify and the Minnesota Vikings quarterback gave his thoughts about why he was not too worried about the coronavirus.
Brandt asked, “If 1 is the person who says, ‘Masks are stupid, you’re all a bunch of lemmings’ and 10 is, ‘I’m not leaving my master bathroom for the next 10 years,’ where do you land?”
After a chuckle, Cousins responded, “I’m not gonna call anybody stupid, for the trouble it would get me in. But I’m about a .000001.”
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Cousins later said, “I want to respect what other people’s concerns are. For me personally, just talking no one else can get the virus, what is your concern if you could get it, I would say I’m gonna go about my daily life. If I get it, I’m gonna ride it out. I’m gonna let nature do its course. Survival-of-the-fittest kind of approach. And just say, if it knocks me out, it knocks me out. I’m going to be OK. You know, even if I die. If I die, I die. I kind of have peace about that.”
Ryan Clark gave a very candid perspective into how he feels about Cousins from being his teammate with the Washington Football Team back in 2014 and being a carrier of the sickle-cell trait that nearly cost him his life.
“I know tough people. I know a ton of tough people. Many of those tough people I have played with consider me a tough person,” Clark said. “As someone here who has dealt with something that happened on the field that almost cost them his life…Kirk Cousins ain’t tough y’all. This is not about toughness.”
Clark also said he would not include Cousins on a particular list and blasted the short-sightedness that leads to a comment like Cousins’s.
“I played with Kirk. Kirk’s a good football player. Kirk is a football player that will stand in and do things that a quarterback has to do. If I had 10 people to take with me and say I wanted to take the 9 other toughest people that played on my team, Kirk Cousins wouldn’t be in that group.
“I think when you make statements like this and you pound your chest like this, it doesn’t show empathy for the people that have lost their lives to COVID-19 and empathy to the people who have lost family members…When you think about protecting yourself and saying that you don’t believe in certain things, if you have compassion, if you care about other people, you are going to do at least what is being mandated of you by the NFL and by your team and listen to some of the things that are going on with the reports of what COVID-19 can do to certain people who are predisposed to having this disease take their lives or put them in the hospital and at least try to protect them.
“This is not a time to judge Kirk Cousins’ opinions, but it is time to talk about what the ramifications of this type of thought process could be for himself, his teammates, or this league.”
Clark took the right approach in not judging the thoughts of his former teammate, but also trying to have people understand things from his own perspective of playing with a health issue. That alone speaks volumes.
