What about the shoulder injury?
Speaking of injuries, something that came up after the season was a right shoulder/elbow issue that Cousins said happened during the Falcons second game against the New Orleans Saints. While on Good Morning Football, Cousins expressed that this issue is something that lingered, despite Cousins claiming in season that his decline in play had nothing to do with an injury.
“I, against the Saints, got hit pretty good in my right shoulder and elbow and from there kind of dealing with that was something I was working through,” Cousins said on GMFB in February. “I just never really could get it to where I wanted it.”
Cousins was specifically asked about clarifying the extent of how much this injury impacted his play in-season. He said that is a question that he, too, has been asking himself “quite a bit.”
“I don’t think it is a simple cut and dry answer,” Cousins said. “I think when you look at the way the season was going, and that hit and kind of where things went after that it feels like it was an inflection point. But if we were to watch the tape together, I can’t sit here and blame every mistake I made on that. It’s somewhere in the middle.”
Cousins went on to say he’s dealt with issues before that lingered in-season, but you play through it. The difference this past year, he said, was all of it happening simultaneously, and him perhaps not being truthful with himself about his own health.
“I’ve sprained my elbow before. I’ve sprained my should before. I have dealt with sprains in my ankle,” he said. “So, what I was feeling was no different than what I felt in other years — but I think the combination of the three, maybe, was the part that I didn’t quite understand and almost how it all works together in the one.”