Perhaps the most memorable moment, though, was the final significant play of the season, when Kirk Cousins threw a pass — late and over the middle — during a potential game-winning drive in Week 17. That interception kept Washington out of the playoffs and sent the team into a sometimes unpleasant offseason, in which coaches and a GM departed, and Cousins still hasn’t signed a long-term deal.

When Cousins recently sat down for a long conversation with MMQB’s Peter King, that interception featured prominently and repeatedly in the conversation, with Cousins himself bringing it up when discussing his situational awareness.

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There were times, he said, “where I didn’t understand the situation well, and you don’t have to look any further than the final play of the season, where I threw an interception, trying to throw it to Pierre Garcon. It was intercepted, and that was a play, where, knowing the situation — first down, we’ve crossed the 50, there’s plenty of time, we only need a field goal to tie, a touchdown would win — there’s no need to force the ball there. You can throw it away, you can try to scramble, you can even take a sack. All of that can be remedied.

“But the decision I chose to make for that situation was catastrophic for our team,” Cousins went on. “So that’s something I’m going to get better at and I want to start practicing day in and day out during OTAs, thinking about situations over and over.”

King then asked Cousins how to keep moments of high-profile failure — like that one — from leaving a permanent scar. Cousins seemed amused.

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“Unless you’ve walked with me my entire career — by going back to youth football, high school football — you don’t realize that this isn’t the first time I’ve thrown game-ending interceptions, this isn’t the first time that I’ve cost my team the season, this isn’t the first time that I’ve had a failure that’s kept me up at nights. You know, this is what happens. This is part of the journey. I threw a game-ending interception at Notre Dame my sophomore year of college that at the time I thought was the end of the world. And I look back now and just chuckle.

“It was a part of the process, and I think that much the same way any of the failures I’ve had in the NFL. I was benched in 2014 and it looked like I might be resigned to be a career backup, at best, at that time, so you look back at that now and you chuckle. And I think that whether it was the interception at the end of the season or other negative plays throughout the year, you have to just have the mental emotional and physical toughness to just keep pushing and keep going and understanding that over time, that can become a distant memory.”

Later, Cousins explained how thankful he was to have played for former coach Mike Shanahan, “to learn from him, the way he sees the game.” That experience, he said “will affect my entire professional career.” And when King asked Cousins what exactly he learned from Shanahan, the quarterback came back to that same interception.

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“It’s little lessons like read with your feet — let your drop, your footwork tell you when to progress from No. 1 to No. 2,” Cousins said. “Don’t wait on a guy if you think he’s going to come open. If your feet are telling you that the timing of play has forced you to get on with your progression, then move on. And the interception I threw against the Giants is a great reminder of that. My feet had told me to not throw the ball where I threw it and to move on, and yet I ignored that and threw the ball anyway.”



So why did he disobey his feet, King asked.

“Well, I think that’s the question, right, is why did I do it,” Cousins said. “And I have to go back and say, ‘Why did I do it?’ And I think it’s a lack of situational awareness. Trying to make a play so badly, trying to do too much, trying to fix everything in one throw is a classic quarterback mistake, where you have to just be patient and let the game come to you. Even in crucial moments, in two-minute drills, you still have to let the game come to you. And that’s what Tom Brady’s been so good at for so many years, something I’m still working on. But I do think plays like that help teach you and remind you the next time to be that much more disciplined. It’s a gradual process.”