Some people are fans of the Arizona Cardinals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Arizona Cardinals. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
You team: The Arizona Cardinals
Your 2024 record: 8-9, allegedly. This team generates so little national attention, I had to fact-check this on the microfiche reader at the Yuma public library. A Cardinals 8-9 is never like a normal team’s 8-9 - there’s something suspicious afoot. Let’s roll the bodycam footage and see what actually transpired:
The Cards started off the season with a borderline respectable one-possession loss at Buffalo. A flukey beatdown over the Rams in Week 2 was enough to distract Arizonans from their state pastime (drunk driving) long enough to watch Jared Goff and rookie Jayden Daniels hang a combined 62 points on them in consecutive losses at home. Week 5 brought another divisional win over the 49ers, who would go on to post their worst record in six years. After that, it was Jordan Love’s turn to carve up your defense, throwing for four touchdowns in a Week 6 loss at Lambeau. It should be a class A felony to make Jordan Love look cool.
Then the Cardinals went on a four-game win streak, but it’s worth a pause to note which teams they beat—the Chargers, Dolphins, Bears, and Jets. These snakebit Ponzi schemes haven’t won a playoff game in a combined 58 years, which would make that drought the youngest citizen in Arizona by two decades.
The half-dozen of you who care about this team are no strangers to a late-season meltdown, and boy was this one special. These Cardinals treated you to losses in five of their seven remaining games, with the Panthers (of all teams) slamming the door on your playoff hopes in Week 16. The only two teams the Cards beat down the stretch were the Patriots and Niners, both in rigor mortis by then. So there you have it—eight wins, all of them empty calories, and only two of them against teams that finished over .500. You owe Kyle Shanahan an Edible Arrangement for sparing you the shame of finishing dead last in this crab-bucket division for the third year in a row. Cardinals games should only be on Tuesdays at 3:00 a.m.
Your coach: That one annoying dad that tries to sell you on intermittent fasting every time you’re stuck next to him at your kid’s soccer game.
Jonathan Gannon arrived in Glendale a couple years ago after his Eagles defense pissed down their legs in the second half of the Super Bowl, losing to the widely despised Kansas City Chiefs. There was no market whatsoever for this man, but the Cardinals found a way to catch a tampering charge in the process of acquiring him. That’s like getting jail time for breaking into the Louvre to steal a mop from the janitor’s closet. There’s no point in listing the other Kirkland brand coaches on this staff, you wouldn’t recognize a single name anyway. Finishing 8-9 feels like momentum until you realize your absolute ceiling with this dweeb is 9-8. Speaking of maxed out potential…
Your quarterback: Your moody teenage nephew moments after he was forced to turn off his Nintendo Switch at grandpa’s wake.
Kyler Murray bravely answers the question “What if my quarterback is a gifted athlete but is perpetually injured, loathed by his teammates, and despises football?” Lucky for him, the Cardinals’ fanbase is too delirious from sun poisoning to string together a cogent thought, much less ponder what the future holds for a seventh-year quarterback who has yet to cobble together two healthy seasons in a row. You had him for all 17 games last season, which means both of his knees are about to combust. The good news is you have at least one backup who can see over a steering wheel—QB Jacoby Brissett is here on his 90th career stop. He’ll sign with three more teams by the time you finish reading this preview, but thankfully we have third-string QB Clayton Tune here to man the switchboard in his absence. I give it until Thanksgiving before callers are earnestly floating Ryan Tannehill’s name on Phoenix sports radio.
What's new that sucks: The NFLPA released its annual report card, so I’m sure you know where this is going. Not only did the Cards come in DFL in the overall grade, they made zero improvements to the problem areas from their previous last-place ranking two years ago—namely team facilities and food. Owner Michael Bidwill inherited this franchise from his father (who inherited it from his father) and despite the NFL aiming a firehose of cash directly into his pocket, he runs this ballclub like a Maricopa County tent prison. No wonder the players hate it here, they have to fight coyotes for meat scraps in the cafeteria dumpster after practice.
Elsewhere in this brushfire, LB Josh Sweat is new in town with a fresh Super Bowl ring to reunite with his former coordinator and spend whatever’s left of his athletic prime contracting MRSA in the locker room. The Cards locked in TE Trey McBride on a 4-year deal, so he can look forward to fielding desperate checkdowns from Kyler until one of them gets traded or the stadium is swallowed by a sinkhole, whichever comes first.
What has always sucked: Arizona is nothing but anti-vax nurses in bedazzled MAGA hats and retired cops too racist for Florida. This is where Boomers migrate from the flyover states when their adult kids put them on no-contact status. They should change the state motto to “Missed Call: Dad”. Even if these addled, dehydrated insurrectionists cared about football (they don’t), it’s still a terrible place to be a pro athlete. Kevin Durant Irish-exited in the dead of night to chase a ring in a real city. Brittney Griner felt a deep sense of relief leaving Phoenix, and she once survived a 10 month bid in a Russian gulag.
The Cardinals never met a generational player whose career they couldn’t squander. This franchise had Larry Fitzgerald for 17 years and the closest he ever got to a championship was watching helplessly from the sideline as the defense let triple-covered Santonio Holmes catch a walkoff touchdown in the Super Bowl. Don’t worry, I’m sure they have a solid plan for the next crop of galactically talented prospects that fall in their lap…
What might not suck: WR Marvin Harrison Jr. got jacked over the summer and should make a leap in his sophomore season. I look forward to the new and exciting ways this team alienates him over the next few years before he skips town to win a title somewhere else. You lucked into a pair of stud rookies in DT Walter Nolen III and CB Will Johnson. I hope neither of them end up on IR after stepping on a rusty nail in the training room sauna.
DT Calais Campbell is a class act, and is back in red and white presumably to give you the undeserved honor of retiring a Cardinal after this season.
The NFC West is very much up for grabs now that Matthew Stafford has one foot in the door at the glue factory, Brock Purdy is both bad and cripplingly expensive, and Sam Darnold is, ultimately, Sam Darnold. Don’t blow it, Arizona! Or, better yet, do blow it and set yourselves up to throw your hat in the ring when Joe Burrow inevitably demands a trade next summer. I don’t give a shit, and neither should you.
HEAR IT FROM CARDINALS FANS!
Brooks:
How many games will I turn off before halftime because they didn't bother to show up? How many times will I get to hear Mark Sanchez use an offensive asian voice talking about how much Kyler loves Bruce Lee? How many D-Lineman will get hurt before week 1? How many times will the OC continue the Kingsbury tradition of throwing behind the line of scrimmage on 3rd and 9? Will MHJ improve upon his zero contested catches rate? How many female interns will be included on the front office class action suit? Is this the year the QB finally hits 4k passing yards in a league that lets any pud do that? The only good thing that would happen if they won the Super Bowl in the next four years is Bidwell might have a coronary jacking himself raw to the thought of orange man inviting him to the white house.
Kevin:
Based on the current state of the four (I'm including the defunct one too) Arizona sports who all suck, it's clear that Arizona sports fans are among the dumbest of any city:
The Coyotes left, but even up until they were pretending to try and get another stadium (go look at their derelict socials for a laugh) their fans were convinced that the owner Meruelo wasnt a con man swindling them with a stadium plan that mayors of two valley towns hated. But credit to Tempe voters for voting against giving him a cent for a stadium and instead choosing to keep a landfill which turned out to be the beginning of the end.
The Suns are also now owned by a con man who has completely tanked a championship contending team by meddling and over spending. The fans defended the billionaire because he gave them $2 hot dogs and free games over the internet. Now the fans are convinced he's on some sort of redemption arc because he's admitting he's involved, but in reality they're just getting conned again.
The Diamondbacks owner has now swindled the state out of tax dollars through a state bill directing all tax revenue generated at the stadium towards stadium repairs/upgrades. Again, Arizona fans are dumb enough to think directing tax revenue away from education to a stadium is a good thing, which when you see AZ educational rankings makes sense.
And finally of course this team, which is lead by a QB who proudly said he doesn't watch much film because he "sees so much" who after his worst game pouted until the owner was dumb enough to give him a contact extension the team regretted less than a year later. The owner has turned into an evolved version of his father, the teams facilities are the worst (makes his dad proud), and he uses the teams social media to support Trump's judicial picks. Ten years without a division title or playoff win and the fans still buy tickets and support the qb.
Chris:
God help me, the Cardinals were actually decent last year. I quit watching after the bye week when they were leading the division, so I assume they didn't go 2-5 down the stretch and miss the playoffs.
Either the best or worst part of it all is that I don't seem to care enough to get mad anymore. I don't know if it's because I'm more into soccer these days, or because—since they have a competent GM who (so far) has not received a Turbo DUI Plus—they don't even have the courtesy to be enough of a dumpster fire to stay in the news. And they damn sure aren't good enough to be a perennial playoff contender. They're just...there. And often forgotten about.
The opposite of love is indifference, and this team is nothing more than a generic profile silhouette on a buggy social media app. The Cardinals franchise is basically the modern Democratic Party—frequently shitty, sometimes decent, always fucking useless.
Speaking of rich people you can't get rid of and who won't quit shooting themselves in the dick, the owner is an asshole who spends the bulk of the offseason each year coming up with new ways to be the subject of a "this guy is an asshole" news article four years later. I'm mildly surprised he's not publicly full-blown MAGA at this point.
Kyler is fun but inconsistent, and the next time he comes through in the clutch moments of a game with playoff implications will be the first.
Nick Rallis is a wizard, and I'm sincerely excited to see what he can do with a defense full of actual good defensive players.
Kyle:
Look, they're a joke with a bad owner. No one can argue they don't suck.
However, they're my team because they moved to AZ when I was a kid, so they became my team because it was Arizona and the choices were the Broncos (never) and Chargers. Chargers were cool but as big of losers as the Cardinals.
Anyway, I read somewhere last year someone say Kyler Murray runs like a toddler and while I was never a fan, this absolutely ruined any remaining hope for him. Your team can't win with a dude that runs like he's just wearing a diaper, much less a diaper full up with pee and poo.
Clay:
I still can't believe we used up our allocated one year of relevance per decade by farting out of the playoffs in 2021 with the 2016 Pro Bowl roster.
When Cooper DeJean took in that pick 6 in the Super Bowl my immediate reaction was to check if we had screwed up by picking the wrong corner. The answer... kinda? We traded down with Atlanta and then copped the back end of a run of corners instead. Great job. Great fucking job.
Kyler Murray is past the "He COULD be elite with the right tools!" phase and into the "Well, he's not going to actively LOSE games for us" phase.
The stat that Arizona has never lost a playoff game at home would be a hell of a lot more impressive if it was more than a grand total of 5 games in 78 years - precisely ZERO of which were between 1948 and 2007.
By rights we should be improving further in Gannon's third year but you know and I know that it will either end in a Wild Card embarrassment or a nondescript 6-11 season where the most interesting thing to happen will be Trey McBride accidentally bulldozing Marvin Harrison en route to a 34-20 loss to Houston in Week 15. Can't wait.
John:
By all rights, I should be a Chicago Bears fan. I grew up in central Illinois in the 80s. I was 13 when the Bears won their last Super Bowl. I should have had Walter Payton gear plastered around my bedroom and the Super Bowl Shuffle on repeat.
By rights, considering the Bears on-field performance since that Super Bowl, I should be miserable. And I am!
But this is not the sort of misery caused by a flagship franchise of the NFL consistently crapping the bed. No, what I have is that of a different flagship franchise that doesn't even have a bed to crap in. At a young, dumb, and easily influenced age, I became a fan of the St. Louis/Phoenix/Arizona Cardinals. And so I have been subject to lines that can't block, quarterbacks who can't throw, a defense that can't tackle, and ownership in the form of the Bidwells that make the McCaskeys seem like a paragon of wisdom and virtue.
No coach, no draft pick, no confluence of chance can save the Cardinals from their predestined fate. They suck, they always have sucked, and they always will suck. The only good thing about this is that at least I don't have children. I would hate to inflict my pain on them.
Screw this dipshit franchise with a cactus.
Thomas:
Last season was a step in the right direction? I guess? We seem to be drafting better but we're allergic to spending money on free agents. We're 4th in cap space and have the 3rd least dead money for the 2025 season. What are we waiting for?
This season really feels like Kyler's his last chance with the Cardinals, and I don't know that I can say that the team is giving him everything he needs to succeed. Say what you will about the quality of his play, at the very least he is always entertaining to watch. When he's inevitably traded, we won't even have that going for us.
I'm so tired of defending Kyler from the haters. How much of Kyler's reputation is earned and how much is it the result of Bidwill's smear campaign during contract negotiations?
Our fucking cheap-ass collusive owner would rather be respected by other owners than win. He's basically the opposite of Jeffrey Lurie.
David:
I used to get worked up about this team - so much so that my fandom became a running joke amongst my friends. Many years ago I made a post on MySpace (yes, I’m old, fuck off) before the start of the season titled “Year of the Cardinal” where I detailed how all the offseason moves the Cardinals had made were sure to result in at least a Division banner, but likely a Conference trophy, and *gasp* perhaps even their first-ever Super Bowl appearance!
The Cardinals went 5-11 that year, and I got kicked out of a sports bar that offseason during the NFL Draft cause I absolutely lost my shit when the Cards passed on Terrell Suggs. Now every year my friends text me asking if this is the “Year of the Cardinal” (spoiler alert: the answer is always no).
I no longer get worked up about this team. I never have hope for an upcoming season, and I no longer give a fuck when the Cardinals inevitably shit the bed. Is this because I’m dying inside as I get older? Or is it because the game of American football feels more and more like a plodding corporate pageant whose sole purpose is to funnel advertising dollars into the pockets of evil billionaires?
Maybe if I cheered for a good team I’d be willing to overlook all the late-stage capitalism intertwined with the game. Instead, I cheer for this sorry ass franchise, so I get to ask myself if I’m really supposed to give a shit about a team that’s been in my home state for 37 years yet still feels like an expansion team trying to find its footing with the local fans.
Am I supposed to rally behind the dipshit failson of an owner who added luxury cabanas to the end zone after removing the last affordable tickets in the lower bowl? Maybe with this revenue he can now afford to pay off yet another settlement for the latest harassment suit filed against him. His buddy Brett Kavanaugh must be so fucking proud.
Or maybe I’m supposed to take out a loan so I can afford to bring my family to see a game in the new Casa Roja section of the stadium, where premium seats have been replaced by corporate-sponsored suites? No thanks - if I wanted an overpriced and completely forgettable experience catered by Sam Fox, I’d go to one of his shitty restaurants.
I wish I had some witty sendoff for this team, but I’ve wasted enough energy on something that’s caused me nothing but grief. I’d say this is the Year of the Cardinal, but only if we mean that this is the year they go below .500, fire their head coach, and begin yet another rebuild after another disaster on the field. Then again, that’s most years, isn’t it? All they deserve is the most basic “fuck this team” that I can hardly be bothered to write.
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