Kirk Cousins points out newspaper mistaking him for DeMarcus Cousins

We’ve seen newspapers mixing up very different athletes with the same last name before, perhaps most notably with The Brandon Sun writing “Keith Hernandez Hangs Himself In Prison” this April. (They meant Aaron.) However, it’s rare to see one of the athletes in question be the main person to notice it. That’s what appears to have happened with Washington Redskins’ quarterback Kirk Cousins, though, who tweeted a newspaper clipping Tuesday that confused him with New Orleans Pelicans’ forward DeMarcus Cousins.

Glad to see my fighting skills are getting proper recognition. @boogiecousins #cousins pic.twitter.com/2qQYtTm9gp

— Kirk Cousins (@KirkCousins8) November 21, 2017

It’s not clear what newspaper that comes from, as there don’t appear to be any other tweets with that photo, and a reverse Google Images search produces no useful results. So it seems like Cousins either took this photo himself or was sent it via e-mail, text or some other non-public method. And the specific text here is interesting; it appears to be from an Associated Press story, one we can find published at USA Today at 10:03 p.m. Eastern Monday night, but it’s not exact because it’s combining the first and second paragraphs together. That’s of course a common practice with sports briefs, especially where space is limited, but that does suggest that whichever editor was involved here did more than just a straight copy and paste, and thus, that the Kirk-for-DeMarcus mistake was on the editor’s end rather than the wire. It is remarkable that no one else appears to have tweeted a photo of this, though. Perhaps Kirk is the only one reading the sports briefs of that particular paper?

It’s understandable how one might make this mistake, especially considering that Kirk Cousins and the Redskins were also in New Orleans, losing 34-31 to the Saints Sunday. And this isn’t as bad as many other newspaper errors we’ve seen over the years, including the aforementioned Hernandez mixup or an accidentally-run paragraph that ruined careers. This is more along the lines of Michigan papers forgetting which team the Lions lost to, or the phrasing used by Florida Times-Union‘s editors. It’s a funny moment, and it’s cool to see Cousins have some fun with it. If only he’d inserted a “You like that!”

[SB Nation]