Last week, after we suggested that the recruitment of Kirk Cousins by the Falcons has reached the point that he’s talking to tight end Kyle Pitts about who will wear No. 8, Pitts tried to shoot it down.
“This is actually funny,” Pitts said. “You guys come up with anything.”
You know what else is actually funny? On Wednesday night, Cousins told reporters that Pitts led the charge in recruiting Cousins to the Falcons, and that it started “back a few weeks.”
While Cousins didn’t say that they addressed who would wear No. 8 during those communications, why wouldn’t it come up, if Pitts was the one leading the charge?
And while it’s not tampering if Pitts was simply doing it on his own, it becomes tampering if he did it with the knowledge of or at the behest of the team. That would be something for the NFL to determine, if/when it’s inclined to investigate. Text messages, emails, etc. would prove it, especially if it happened blatantly. (And it possibly did.)
The circumstantial evidence suggests that the Falcons tampered with Cousins, in multiple ways. The question is whether it was sufficiently blatant to trigger the league to do something about it. Time will tell whether that will happen.
