It isn’t so useful to throw for 300 yards, it turns out, when you go 30 for 49, you throw two interceptions and your team can’t run the ball with any kind of efficiency. Also, when 184 of your 316 yards come after your team trailed by 19 points in the fourth quarter, it kind of hollows out the numbers.

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Cousins’ quarterback rating through three quarters of Washington’s 32-21 loss to the Giants was an abysmal 39.7. By the end of the game, it was 69.8 — below Cousins’ career rating of 79.2, but the kind of number where he could avoid taking the full brunt of the criticism for his team’s defeat.

“We can’t make this all about the quarterback,” Washington coach Jay Gruden said. “We’ve got to create some turnovers on defense. We’ve got to continue to run the ball, and the receivers have got to make some plays. And Kirk’s got to do better. We’ve all got to do better.”

That’s a nice try, but as a former NFL Europe and Arena League quarterback and a man who was hired because of his expertise around the position, Gruden knows full well that it is all about the quarterback. All he had to do was look across the field where, like Washington, New York could not get any sort of consistent running game going, but Eli Manning made the throws he needed to — one to Odell Beckham Jr. to break the game open, one to Reuben Randle to ice it — to lead his team to its first victory of the season.

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Cousins has started 12 games for Washington in his NFL career. His record as a starter is 3-9, with two interceptions in the three wins and 18 interceptions in the nine losses. The two on Thursday night led directly to 14 points for the Giants. Neither Cousins nor the team around him is good enough to overcome that — it took him going 23 for 27 last week to beat the Rams.

“I made a couple of bad plays tonight,” Cousins said. “I’ve got to find a way to clean those up, but I feel like there are things we can build on, things we can move forward on. We moved the football up and down the field. We just didn’t come up with points, and we had turnovers. We’re capable of moving the football. I think, tonight, once again, we were able to do that.”

Sort of. Washington did have three scoring drives in the game, for two field goals and one touchdown. Those drives comprised a total of 35 plays for 189 yards. That’s 5.4 yards per play on Washington’s three most successful drives of the night. The average NFL team last year averaged 5.4 yards per play over the entire season. Washington itself averaged 5.7.

This was a bad performance in a bad game, and it was only natural to wonder about Cousins’ job security. The only problem is that next in line at quarterback for Washington is not Robert Griffin III, who is dynamic enough to perhaps overcome the total lack of a running game, but Colt McCoy, who is a year older, two inches shorter and eight uniform numbers higher than Cousins, but otherwise not that different at all.

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“We’ve got to play better around (Cousins),” Gruden said. “There’s no quarterback controversy.”

None at all. Just the truth, that Cousins is a below-average NFL quarterback, he played like one on Thursday, and his team lost for the ninth time in his 12 career starts.