A majority of the fans in this region on a normal year wear green and gold on Saturdays cheering for the NDSU Bison football team on Saturdays and switch to purple and gold garments on Sunday to cheer for the Vikings. Not all, but the majority do.
With those loyalties, many times fans have a passion for their favorite pro team to either draft or acquire players from their favorite college team. That is why there is a lot of buzz from fans in North Dakota and western Minnesota over the Vikings making a trade for Wentz since there is a rift between the quarterback from Bismarck and the Super Bowl winning coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, Doug Pederson.
Outside of the emotions of wanting a local guy playing for the regional NFL team the trade wouldn’t make much sense. Both teams signed their respective quarterback to a contract extension so cutting or trading them would give them over 30 million dollars a year of dead salary cap money counting against them.
Statistically it wouldn’t make much sense either. Cousins and Wentz are pretty much equal when you look at the numbers. This year Wentz had 15 interceptions and 4 lost fumbles in 13 games. Cousins had 13 interceptions and 5 lost fumbles in 16 games. While Cousins looked better at the end of the year, the bottom line is both players turn the ball over too much and haven’t done enough to lead their teams to winning records on a consistent basis.
The other similar thing between Wentz and Cousins is while many times their offensive line doesn’t look good in pass protection, both quarterbacks on many, and I would say about a little over half the time make their line look worse by not stepping up in the pocket and throwing guys open like the great ones do.
Wentz and Cousins are both good quarterbacks but have a long way to go before we can call them great quarterbacks. They are almost the same guy. All a trade for Wentz would do is make NDSU fans cheer harder for their favorite NFL team, the question would be, would you boo him they way you do Cousins when he makes a bad interception just because he was a Bison? I doubt we will find out but it would be interesting.
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