Kirk Morrison: Why Cousins Has Edge Over Mendoza in Raiders’ QB Competition

Ask Kirk Morrison who should start at quarterback for the Raiders this season, and the former Raider reaches for a line he has leaned on for a long time. "It will all reveal itself," he said, crediting the phrasing to Clint Kubiak.

It is not a dodge. Morrison sees the Raiders' quarterback question as one of several live competitions around the league, alongside Atlanta with Michael Penix and Tua Tagovailoa, and Minnesota with Kyler Murray and J.J. McCarthy. But on the specific matter of Vegas, Morrison is not on the fence about who is ahead right now.

"The leader in the clubhouse to me from what I've seen with my two eyes has been Kirk Cousins," Morrison said. The case is about readiness, not ceiling. Cousins, Morrison said, "has the resume. He has the knowledge of the offense. He has the leadership capabilities."

Morrison pointed to a story that surfaced about rookie Fernando Mendoza learning how to lead in the NFL, which Morrison called one of the hardest things for any rookie quarterback, let alone any rookie player. He remembered his own rookie experience of sitting back and trying to figure out where and how to lead.

That, to Morrison, is the gap. "Kirk Cousins is able to go and say, 'Hey, no, get over here. Line up here. No, you're the X. Get over here,'" Morrison said. "There's a level of expertise that Kirk Cousins has right now that Fernando Mendoza is going to get. He's going to learn. It's not there yet."

The future, Morrison stressed, is not in question. "There's no doubt the future is Fernando Mendoza," he said. The point is timing. "You want to be able to have him go out there when the time is right. We don't want to rush it." The exception, in Morrison's telling, is if Cousins is "just god awful," and from what Morrison has seen and heard so far in t-shirts and shorts, Cousins "has looked pretty good."

The schedule reinforces the conservative approach. After a Week 1 opener against Miami, the slate stiffens fast: at the Chargers, at New Orleans, the Chiefs, at New England, Buffalo, then the Rams. The comparison Morrison and the show reached for was New England's handling of Joshua Brissett and Drake Maye, letting the veteran (Jacoby Brissett) open the season before turning to the rookie (Drake Maye) around midseason.

But Morrison also knows how these things actually go, both as a player and as someone who has been in those rooms. "As a player, you kind of know," he said. "You can't fool players on the team. That's the one thing you can't do." The practice field tells the truth that fans, media and writers can only speculate about.

And he knows the pull toward the rookie is relentless. "Once you put Fernando Mendoza in, he's not coming out," Morrison said. The danger is waiting too long. "Everybody says quarterback's going to wait. He's going to wait. And all of a sudden, you're one and three. It's like, put him out there. Put him out there."

The show ran through the cautionary tales: the uncertainty around Jackson Dart, Cam Ward entering year two, Caleb Williams' apparent jump, and what looks like a regression for C.J. Stroud going into his fourth year. Examples sit all across the league. Which is exactly, Morrison said, why we overreact.