Alright, the Cardinals, and I think this might be the most lopsided matchup of team talent versus division difficulty in the entire league this year, so let’s get into why I think this is one of the worst teams in football.

The recap. Arizona finished 3-14 last year, dead last in a division that turned out to be absolutely brutal, the Seahawks won it at 14-3 on their way to winning the whole Super Bowl, and both the Rams and 49ers finished 12-5. Kyler Murray started the year but went down for good with a foot injury after five games, going 2-3 in that stretch, and Jonathan Gannon got fired as head coach mid-season. Jacoby Brissett took over and actually put up genuinely good individual numbers, 3,366 yards with a 23-to-8 touchdown-to-interception ratio, but the team around him went just 1-11 with him as the starter. That tells you everything about where this roster actually stands, a competent quarterback performance still buried the team in a double-digit loss season because there just isn’t enough talent around him.

So the Cardinals moved on from Murray for good, officially releasing him this offseason, and he ended up signing with the Vikings. They brought in Mike LaFleur as the new head coach, a product of the Shanahan and McVay coaching trees, to try and get this thing turned around. And here’s where I have my first real question mark, they re-signed Brissett to a new deal worth up to $21 million to remain the starter, beating out third-round rookie Carson Beck for the job. And honestly, I don’t really get the logic here. Brissett is a 33-year-old bridge quarterback on a team that has zero shot at competing for anything meaningful this year, so what exactly is the benefit of starting him over just handing the reins to Beck and finding out what you actually have in a guy who went 37-6 as a college starter across Georgia and Miami? If this team is genuinely three or four wins away from being competitive no matter who’s under center, you might as well use this lost season to get real answers about your rookie instead of running it back with a stopgap who isn’t part of any long-term plan.

The one legitimately exciting piece of this offseason is running back Jeremiyah Love, who they took third overall in the draft, the highest a running back has gone since Saquon Barkley in 2018. He signed a four-year, $53 million rookie deal, the most guaranteed money ever given to a rookie running back, and it’s easy to see why given how bad Arizona’s run game was last year, finishing dead last in the league at just 93.1 rushing yards per game. Love was a Heisman finalist and Doak Walker Award winner at Notre Dame, and by all accounts he’s a legitimately special talent. The concerning part is he suffered a high ankle sprain in the preseason and has barely gotten on the field so far, so there’s real uncertainty about how much he’s actually available for early in the season, and even once he is, the Cardinals have said they want to manage his workload carefully given the state of this roster.

Outside of Love, there’s some real talent still around, Marvin Harrison Jr. and Michael Wilson give this passing game some juice, and Trey McBride was a first-team All-Pro tight end last year, so it’s not like the cupboard is completely bare. But one great tight end, a talented but limited rookie running back working back from injury, and a bridge quarterback who’s shown he can put up numbers without actually winning games just isn’t enough to compete in this division.

And the defense, as expected, is not bailing anybody out either. Last year this unit was genuinely awful, 27th in the league against the run, allowing 4.8 yards a carry, and 29th in EPA allowed per pass attempt. Injuries absolutely gutted them too, 2025 first-round pick Walter Nolen was limited to six games and needed knee surgery, cornerback Garrett Williams tore his Achilles late in the year on top of an earlier knee injury, Sean Murphy-Bunting missed the entire season, and Starling Thomas tore his ACL in camp. The one bright spot was rookie corner Will Johnson, who flashed some real ability with 10 pass breakups in his 12 games despite the ups and downs you’d expect from a rookie. Instead of using this offseason to actually fix things, they lost two of their best defensive players in free agency, Calais Campbell and Jalen Thompson, and mostly replaced them with depth pieces like Roy Lopez, Andrew Billings, and Jonah Williams, nobody who really moves the needle. They didn’t touch defense at all through the first two days of the draft either. New head coach LaFleur did keep coordinator Nick Rallis around for some continuity, but with the talent level actually going backwards, most projections already have this as one of the worst defenses in the entire league again this year.

And that division really is the whole story here. The NFC West might be the toughest division in the entire NFL right now. The defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks are sitting right there, the Rams and 49ers both won 12 games last year, and there’s just no realistic path to Arizona beating any of those three teams even once, let alone multiple times. That’s essentially six automatic losses built into the schedule before the season even starts, and that’s before you get into the rest of a league that’s only getting more competitive every year.

So here’s where I land on the Cardinals. This is a rebuilding roster with a talented but hurt rookie running back, a stopgap quarterback situation that doesn’t seem to be building toward anything real, and a defense and supporting cast that just isn’t good enough to hang with anybody in this division. I think Arizona is going to be squarely in the mix for a top pick in next year’s draft, and I wouldn’t be shocked if this front office starts leaning into that reality as the season goes along, especially if Brissett struggles or gets hurt and they finally turn to Beck to see what they actually have.

It’s honestly a strange approach for a team that everyone, including the front office itself with how it drafted, seems to acknowledge is still rebuilding. You spend a top-three pick on a running back to build around for the future, but you hand the actual quarterback reins to a 33-year-old on an expiring situation instead of the rookie you just paid real draft capital for. That’s the kind of disconnect that makes me think this organization still isn’t fully committed to a real, coherent long-term plan, and that inconsistency usually shows up in the win column too.

My prediction is the Cardinals finish 3-14 again this year, and honestly that might be a bit generous given the division they’re stuck in. There’s just no version of this roster that I see competing for wins on a weekly basis, and I think this ends up being a long, tough season in the desert with plenty of eyes on the draft order by the time December rolls around.

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