A week ago, Kirk Cousins and Maxx Crosby were being pulled apart by their Raiders teammates after a heated training-camp exchange. Now, apparently, there’s only one way left to settle the score: a UFC fight. At least that’s how Crosby seems to see it.
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On August 15, the Raiders star defensive end posted an AI-generated fight poster featuring him and Cousins as if they were about to battle in a UFC event!
“ITS TIME TO SETTLE OUR BEEF ONCE AND FOR ALL!! ITS FIGHT NIGHT!! 😭😭😭😭😭 @KirkCousins8 @ufc @danawhite,” Crosby posted on X on August 15, along with an AI-generated poster.
Even though this might have been a joke, it was the first time Crosby addressed his fight with Cousins. And Crosby wasn’t the only one having fun with it. His wife, Rachel, shared the post on her Instagram Story and took a shot at all the media coverage around the incident.
“😂😭😭shout out to the media since y’all really make a story out of nothing.”
The entire ordeal happened during the training camp. Crosby was spotted striking Cousins on his throwing arm. The quarterback lost his cool when Crosby delivered what is reported to be a second hit on a tipped pass. He grabbed the defensive end’s jersey, and the two exchanged some words before they were separated. Now, while fights are not unheard of during training camps, the Raiders clearly didn’t want this one to simply blow over. So, they were ready to hand them over their punishments.
The next day, both Cousins and Crosby were kept out of the team drills. This gave rookie quarterback Fernando Mendoza his first real chance in camp to run the starting offense.
“We have very clear expectations about how we want to practice, how you go about our business,” head coach Klint Kubiak said. “We violated that yesterday, so we held those guys out. That’s all I’m going to say about it. We addressed it with the team and we’re moving on.”
Kubaik later acknowledged that the incident wasn’t completely out of the ordinary for camp.
“Yeah, that’s training camp,” Kubiak said. “Those are two leaders of our team going at it. So, that is part of camp.” However, the thing is, while the Raiders have moved on, the outside world certainly hasn’t.
Was this really just a training-camp fight?
ESPN’s Kevin Clark was not convinced that the incident was as harmless as the team made it sound. He made it clear on First Take.
“I don’t think it was anything till they held them out of practice for a day, which seems to suggest that there was a level of seriousness to it.”
This only opened the door for more speculation. Then NBA veteran Joe Johnson also gave a theory, which by all means seems to be one of the wildest ones out there. He suggested on the Nightcap podcast that Crosby may have deliberately hit Cousins because he wanted the Raiders to trade him.
“Ya’ll know Crosby wants to be in Dallas, man,” Johnson said. “He’s trying to do whatever he can to get on up out there, come to Dallas.”
Now, as crazy as it sounds, this theory didn’t come out of thin air. Crosby had already been at the center of major trade drama earlier in this offseason, with a potential move to the Baltimore Ravens falling apart after they had some long-term concerns about his medicals.
But leaving everything aside, the simple explanation to everything that happened just maybe that Crosby is being Crosby.
Crosby is simply being himself
Crosby is known for aggression on the field and his occasionally unsavory conduct with players. In 2024, he tried to bug then-Indianapolis Colts quarterback Gardner Minshew by calling him “little a– boy.”
A mic’d-up Minshew said later on, “Maxx Crosby is so damn angry.”
Interestingly enough, here’s what Crosby said while addressing that incident:
“I’m always trying to find an advantage and get in people’s heads,” he said on Pro Football Talk. “So for me, I’m usually not the one that starts it. But if there’s something that triggers me a little bit, I’m going all the way. So I don’t want to say I don’t want to get there, but once I start, there’s no stopping.”
Meanwhile, this isn’t the first time Crosby has been linked to the UFC, as CEO Dana White once suggested an interesting take on the Raiders’ edge.
“When you look at a lot of these guys that play in the NFL, if they… Imagine if Maxx Crosby trained in MMA since he was a kid, he would be a world champion right now,” White said. “And I believe that to my core. And I know a lot of s—about Maxx Crosby that you guys don’t know.”
Will Kirk Cousins and Maxx Crosby bury the hatchet before the season begins? We will have to wait an watch.