Kirk Cousins and Ben Roethlisberger

Ben Roethlisberger has won two Super Bowls. If you watched them, you might have noticed that he played horribly both times. I recall this very sharply because I lost a very large investment on propositions related to BR playing well in the second SB, thinking that he was jittery the first time and would perform at least to par in the second. The irony was that though he did below average again, his team ended up covering, in one of the two worst REOs (Ref-Engineered Outcomes) I've seen in decades of NFL viewing. (The other was the St. Louis Rams Super Bowl against the NE Patriots.)

The point for our purposes here, to restate, is that Ben Roethlisberger has two Super Bowl wins and he played worse than poorly in both of them. Do you seriously doubt Kirk Cousins is less capable than that? I don't.

There's also the fact that KC gets the ball out, doesn't get sacked. Doesn't take the terrible abuse Roethlisberger does physically. This is an underrated factor among reasons to keep Cousins. It shouldn't be.

KC is a more valuable QB today than Ben Roethlisberger, and will become only more so as the years go by. BR will decline and retire while KC continues to improve.