What if Quarterbacks were Salad Dressings?

If you had to pour an NFL quarterback over just one pile of lettuce and cucumbers, which one would you choose?

Kirk Cousins is ranch dressing.

No personality in popular American culture embodies the ranch dressing zeitgeist quite like Cousins. He’s the quarterback for a nation that has conditioned itself to mistake pricey, flavorless, comfortable mediocrity for excellence. 

Cousins is ranch dressing atop iceberg lettuce with some salty-brick croutons; the lettuce wasn’t even dried thoroughly after rinsing, so there’s a viscous milky puddle at the bottom of the bowl. 

Cousins is ranch dressing for dipping cloyingly-sauced boneless wings when dining at a chain restaurant beside a dying mall before driving 40 minutes home through suburban sprawl to watch an uninspired live-action remake of a beloved anime series on Netflix. He’s an entire lifestyle built out of dull, perfunctory choices.  

You know what else is a dull, perfunctory choice? Resorting to Kirk Cousins jokes and goofy listicles during slow periods in the NFL news cycle.

Josh Allen is blue cheese. The Buffalo wing angle makes the comparison obvious. But Allen’s risky style also mimics the dressing experience. Watching Allen throw an interception instead of a five-yard checkdown on third-and-four is like biting into a chunk of the actual cheese and getting an umami blast up your sinuses when you were expecting a meaty mouthful of chicken or the sweet crunch of a carrot. Allen’s game is marbled with something moldy that makes it wonderful but would be unpalatable in larger doses.

Look at the fiercely-independent veteran scribe, free of the shackles of editorial demands and searchable-keyword dictates, scrambling to the safety of sub-Bleacher Report humor after just two months on his own. He’s like a divorcee blowing up his ex-wife’s phone on the first lonely Saturday night. Couldn’t even make it through March Madness without writing some clickbait, smh.

Joe Burrow is Roquefort dressing: smoother, better-balanced and objectively better than blue cheese, but not always available at the salad bar. 

When joking with a young colleague at the combine about the quarterbacks-as-salad-dressings concept – the conversation went something like, I’m starting a Substack because I don’t want to have to do dumb stuff like compare quarterbacks to salad dressings anymore – he confided in me that he had no idea what Roquefort dressing was. “Confided” may be the wrong word. He said something like, “what the f**k is Roquefort?” 

That’s the problem with this country: kids these days are no longer forced to go to frumpy tablecloth restaurants and sit in sullen boredom while their elders eat sophisticated foods with names like “Wellington” or “Thermidor” and discuss OPEC or whatever the hell my parents and grandparents discussed while I hid mushy peas beneath my mashed potatoes. Those dinners built character, damnit. Now families go to chain restaurants with 100 televisions and boneless wings where mom can get a daiquiri in what looks like a flower vase and everyone can space out to college basketball when grandpa starts ranting about drag shows. 

So, is he just rehashing a bad idea as a joke/dare, or is this an actual midlife crisis?

Lamar Jackson is Caesar dressing. No, not the stuff you get in a bottle: that stuff is, like, latter-day Russell Wilson. Jackson is Caesar dressing prepared at your table at a Mad Men-style steakhouse: raw farm-fresh egg yolk, parmesan grated straight from a hunk procured at the Italian Market, pepper from a grinder that could deal 1d6 bludgeoning damage, a little anchovy macerated into the bottom of the bowl before you have time to realize what a bad idea that appears to be.

Caesar dressing, like Jackson, is the star of the salad because, let’s face it, the “salad” is just a pile of romaine lettuce. Watching him is an event in and of itself, though it still leaves you hankering for that juicy steak. Wait .. is the steak coming? WHERE IS THE STEAK, LAMAR?

This guy did lose a lot of jobs in a short span of time: that’s gotta be rough on the ego. This isn’t quite a plea for help yet, but the more he keeps interjecting in italicized third person block quotes, pretending to be a hypothetical reader, the more I start to worry.

Jalen Hurts is that warm bacon dressing that accompanies spinach salad. It’s delicious – it’s full of bacon drippings, for heaven’s sake – but it only really goes with spinach salad.

Dak Prescott, like thousand island, doesn’t always get the credit he’s due. He’s the special sauce on the Big Mac – America’s Burger! – after all. But if you rank your fast-food burgers by personal taste, the Big Mac might barely crack the Top 10, especially if Five Guys or Shake Shack are on the list with various Whoppers and Baconators.

Jared Goff is Russian dressing: Thousand island with less oomph. 

Tua Tagovailoa is creamy French dressing. It’s ketchup and Mayo, people. You could whip some up using the packets next to the chili dispenser at 7-Eleven. Stop pretending it’s something it’s not. 

Maybe he’s just hungry. Was he fasting for Lent? No way he fasts for Lent. Ramadan? No, definitely Lent, and no.

The 49ers are a farmers’ market-fresh salad: crisp romaine, endive and radicchio; heirloom tomatoes; thinly-sliced cucumbers; julienned radishes; hard-boiled egg; maybe some red-bell pepper and/or snap peas, all of it in the soil/hen at 5 AM but in your bowl at 5 PM. Brock Purdy, therefore, can afford to be a basic vinaigrette of light olive oil, salt, pepper, crushed garlic, basil and a splash of unpretentious vinegar.

When I was a newlywed, I tried to cook for my in-laws at their home a few times. My mother-in-law was of the generation that threw off the shackles of the kitchen, my father-in-law of the generation which refused to pick them up, and both were so whitebread that they considered seasonings as basic as garlic exotic and ethnic. I was appalled to find no olive oil anywhere in the house, and probably the neighborhood; the only cooking oil available was stuff I might use to lubricate a crankshaft. I rushed to the store for the ingredients for a simple in-season-tomato/basil/mozzarella salad dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper. My in-laws looked at it like one of the monkey skulls from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They wanted a Kirk Cousins salad.

Oh yeah, this is a midlife crisis. Maybe someone should remind him that he’s only four teams into the Top Five QB series. Nostalgia about Tony Eason is much more readable than nostalgia about f**king caprese.

Justin Herbert is imported Tuscan extra virgin olive oil, raspberry-hibiscus balsamic vinegar, Madagascar sea salt, white peppercorns and black garlic smoked over hickory logs by twilight in the Sonoran desert. If it’s indistinguishable from the oil-and-vinegar dressing you buy at Costco, that’s because your tastes are unrefined.

Joe Flacco is Creamy Italian: ranch with an “o” at the end of its name. Tommy DeVito is Olive Garden creamy Italian.

Baker Mayfield is salsa ranch. Bottled ranch dressing, like Kirk Cousins, is more-or-less OK, really. So is jarred salsa when you just want something generically zesty to plunge a tortilla chip into. Ranch and salsa distributed separately across some crunchy appetizer can be pretty good. But swirl ranch and salsa into one concoction and you get a pinkish gloop which smells vaguely like the aftermath of a stomach virus. Yet, like the Buccaneers, you find yourself buying more salsa ranch because it sounds like it should be tasty and kinda exciting. 

Derek Carr is creamy cucumber: pretty much ranch, but with weird branding and aftertaste.

OK, I think I’ve figured it out. This is supposed to be a deconstruction of a quarterback listicle. It’s a Starship Troopers thing, so deadpan that it can be taken seriously, but he added some self-referential/depreciating asides to layer the gag a bit.

Justin Fields is Miracle Whip. Technically, Miracle Whip is dressing, even though it looks like mayo and is usually shelved with the mayo. It’s pretty good in coleslaw and passable in tuna. Smear a little on a turkey-on-rye and you can talk yourself into enjoying it. Now I DARE you to ladle a dollop of it onto a garden salad. You’ll want to spit it out at first, but you don’t want to prove the critics right. So you will try to build your whole salad out of things that might pair with Miracle Whip. Red cabbage? Blanched green beans? Fresh lump crabmeat? Eventually, you will make a salad in which Miracle Whip is the worst ingredient, thereby proving (to yourself, anyway) that Miracle Whip is awesome.

Kenny Pickett is no dressing. I can picture Mike Tomlin last season eating a pile of leaves and insisting, “Yes, this is good, this is what I prefer.”

C.J. Stroud is honey mustard, dressing so good it goes on just about everything except salad: chicken tenders, French fries, soft pretzels, etc. You probably have no idea how it tastes on a salad, but you probably didn’t watch the Texans at all until the playoffs last year. You just knew Stroud was good, and you were right. 

Matthew Stafford is Green Goddess. I always order Green Goddess at SaladWorks. I don’t know what it is even supposed to be. Avocado ranch, I guess?

I also don’t know why I even eat at SaladWorks, where my “healthy” dinner turns out to be a plate of cold pasta and diced cold cuts in a bowl of chartreuse paste with a little wilty leaf litter scattered about. I sometimes order “Green Goblin” to see if the lass assembling my vat of carb-and-sodium cement notices, because I am a card. She rarely does.

As an aside to the aside to the aside: whenever I enter a chain restaurant that proudly emblazons the words “Step One: Pick Your Protein” at the top of the menu, I fight the urge to run screaming from the establishment, then return to crash my car through the front window. Humans eat meat, fish, beans, eggs and so forth, not “protein.” We’re one marketing campaign away from thinking that a restaurant whose menu options begin “Select your preferred nutrient ingestion system, bipedal life form” is a fine place to go on a second date. One minute it’s Kirk Cousins and ranch dressing. The next it’s vitamin slurry and, I dunno, J.J. McCarthy. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!

OK, that last part definitely sounded like Substack.

Anyway, Green Goddess is better than ranch in some hard-to-categorize way, and so is Matthew Stafford.

Aaron Rodgers is Catalina. No one knows what Catalina dressing is, but we know it’s somehow intrinsically better than the other dressings. It’s the condiment for folks who are too self-actualized to heap salty milk fat all over their vegetables. Catalina sneers down upon you, Ranch Boy.

Writing “clickbait” must become habitual after years and years of doing it. Maybe it becomes a compulsion, something his psyche grapples with. Or it’s temptation, a devil on the shoulder whispering to stop prepping for the 2024 draft when readers would much rather read about what Ryan Tannehill and sesame ginger have in common. Or, gosh, it’s April Fools Day and he wrote something breezy so he could take a few days off around Easter. That’s fine, but let’s see if he remembers how to put a bow on this sort of essay. 

So yes, Kirk Cousins is ranch dressing, hahaha. But Falcons fans just watched Arthur Smith make a salad out of apricots, lima beans, chocolate chips and lugnuts, then stick that salad under a broiler, then run it through a blender, then serve it in a cocktail glass with salt and ground-up baby aspirin around the rim. These folks deserve a nice, normal salad.

Furthermore, if you really think about ranch dressing, you soon remember what it was like to be young and broke, or you realize that you have grown old and unadventurous. Ranch got you through college chain-restaurant dates that indeed felt fancy-like. It got your toddlers to eat a vegetable or two. It’s something to dip the celery into on the front porch while your sons are out in your cars living their lives. It’s something great-grandma once labored over, whisking diced herbs from the garden into buttermilk, yet you can dump as much of it as you like over microwaved chicken tenders, then scrape the rest into the sink without a thought. It’s a minor miracle in its own way. If we are too sophisticated for ranch dressing, perhaps we are not really sophisticated at all.

Not bad. But what about the kicker? 

Patrick Mahomes? He’s a hot-fudge sundae.