With quarterback Kirk Cousins heading to Atlanta, he’ll be interested in securing No. 8. The player who currently has that number seems to be interested in surrendering it.
Tight end Kyle Pitts, after posing the question of who gets No. 8, posted an image of himself from his days at Florida, where he wore No. 84. That seems to indicate a willingness by Pitts to give up his number.
The issue came up last week, during my visit with Pat McAfee and company. We talked about our report that Cousins was making plans for a potential move to Atlanta. I mentioned that we’d even heard, but not verified, that Cousins and Pitts were already talking about whether Pitts will surrender No. 8 to Cousins.
Pitts denied it at the time. I ignored his denial, for one very specific reason. Even if it were true, he had to deny it. It’s the kind of contention that, if not denied, could spark a tampering investigation.
Now, we all know that tampering happens all the time, especially in the days before free agency. But the NFL doesn’t ignore all of it. From time to time, the NFL whacks someone. The more blatant the tampering, the more likely the team that tampered is to get punished.
As I told McAfee and his colleagues last week, that part was not verified. We never wrote it here. Still, it’s not much different than the stuff we did verify — that Cousins and his wife were looking for a school for the kids and a house for the family in the vicinity of the Falcons facility.
Some seem to think that Cousins signing with the Falcons validates our report. I don’t completely agree. We never reported that Cousins was signing with the Falcons. We reported that he was making preparations to move his family to Atlanta, if it came to that. Those facts would have been true whether he stayed in Minnesota, signed with the Falcons, or picked any other team.
Of course, if he’d stayed in Minnesota, many would have just assumed what we reported was wrong, citing it for the next year or two when one of our reports amounts to “bad news” for their favorite team, or whatever. And that’s fine. We can only control how we present the information. We can’t control how it will be interpreted.
One thing I’ve learned over the last 23 years is that there will always be people who see what they want to see, and who hear what they want to hear. There also will be people who, for whatever reason, will warp reality in order to call us wrong — and who also ignore reality when it’s time to acknowledge that we just might have been right.
