Landslide: Poll of readers decisive on Cousins, Zimmer, Spielman

The best and worst thing about Twitter is that you can hear a lot of what people are thinking about in a very short amount of time.

In putting that (hopefully) too good use, I offered up the following hypothetical in the form of a poll question Tuesday:

Now, obviously this is a thought exercise and not reality for a number of reasons. There is only a very small chance you, the reader, are a member of the Wilf family. And in any year-end decision-making there is not a restriction on how many of those three can stay or go.

But as I talked about on Wednesday's Daily Delivery podcast, the question did serve a useful purpose in taking the temperature (at least of those who follow me on Twitter) on how the Vikings should chart a path forward.

The results, I will say, were a surprise to me.

While I didn't expect a perfectly even split, I thought each of Zimmer, Spielman and Cousins would get a roughly even share of votes — say, at least 25% each.

Instead, with mere hours before the poll closes and more than 1,000 votes already in, we find Cousins as the landslide leader.

I dare say RandBall has called the election for Kirk, who as of 10 a.m. has 58.6% of respondents saying they would keep him. Spielman checks in a distant second at 27.6%, while Zimmer is at 13.9%. So Cousins has twice as many votes as Spielman, who has twice as many votes as Zimmer.

Part of it could be practical. Keeping Cousins out of the three probably gives the Vikings the best chance to win in 2022. And it is much easier to let go of Zimmer and Spielman than to dispatch Cousins, who has a $45 million cap hit in 2022 and could be tricky to trade.

Part of it could be recency bias, with fans tiring of Zimmer while forgiving Cousins for struggles down the stretch and for missing the Green Bay game.

We'll know soon enough how the actual Wilf family sorts it all out.