The Arizona Cardinals are widely expected to be one of the worst teams in the National Football League in 2023, as they blew things up over the winter in an attempt to change the franchise’s fortunes. With a new head coach and general manager in town in Jonathan Gannon and Monti Ossenfort, respectively, as well as an entirely overhauled roster—the Cardinals let more than half their players from 2022 hit the open market—there are going to be some significant growing pains as the Cardinals figure out the next step for their franchise.
The Right Men for the Job?
The jury is still out on Gannon and Ossenfort, and it should be for the first couple years of their tenure. One thing that is certain, though, is that they have a pretty low bar to reach in order to do better than the last guys in town, head coach Kliff Kingsbury and general manager Steve Keim.
Part of why the Cardinals are in the funk they are today is because of rash personnel decisions that Keim made during his time in Phoenix, like when he traded away a first-round pick in return for middling receiver Marquise Brown. While Brown had a solid, albeit injury-marred season during his first year in the desert, flipping a first-round pick for a guy who’s never managed to meet lofty expectations is a move that put the Cardinals into a hole for years to come: that pick could’ve been spent much better on a younger player with more talent and more years under contract.
Gannon sounds like an excellent people person, with players on the Cardinals raving about his ability as a leader, but it remains to be seen how he’ll perform when he’s out there calling plays in games that matter.
A Look at the Schedule
Right now, the Cardinals are expected to win less than one-third of the games they play this season: their win total over/under is set at or around 4.5 games, the worst margin in all of football. They have the worst odds in the league of winning the Super Bowl this season, tied with the Houston Texans (who I’ll get to in a moment) at +20000. In the NFC West division, they’re expected to finish in last place, listed at +2700 to claim the division title.
A Caesars Arizona promo code will be useful this season as a lot of people are counting the Cardinals out from the get-go, you’re sure to find some favorable odds that you can take advantage of since everyone including the bookmakers aren’t giving them much of a chance.
Looking at the Cardinals’ schedule, three games immediately leap out as winnable: two are their home and home series with the Los Angeles Rams, one of their NFC West rivals, who have fallen off a cliff because of injuries and a lack of cap space since winning the Super Bowl in 2022. The other is a road game against the Houston Texans, who I expect to be cellar-dwellers once again even with quarterback C.J. Stroud now in the fold.
All three of those games take place in Week 6 or later, so even if quarterback Kyler Murray’s recovery from his January ACL surgery does end up costing him regular season games, he should be good to go without any rust by that point.
Keeping Things Interesting
Of course, just because those three games look extremely winnable on paper doesn’t mean the Cardinals will manage to take care of business in all of them. Similarly, they could steal a win or two against teams like the New York Giants, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Chicago Bears. Look at the 2021 season, when Murray stole victory from the jaws of defeat. With the Cardinals trailing by four points with 11 seconds remaining in the game against one of the best teams in the league, things looked all but over when the Bills’ defensive line collapsed the pocket within a second of the snap, hot on Murray’s tail as he sprinted to the sideline. Somehow, some way, he managed to complete a perfect 50-yard pass while on the run, linking up with receiver Deandre Hopkins—who fought off a pair of defenders to corral the ball—for the game-winning touchdown.
That’s not the type of win you can count on, but Murray has the kind of game-breaking ability that could keep the Cardinals in games long enough to sneak away with a win. Ultimately, that’s what will determine whether the Cardinals have a successful season or not. It’s possible that they could go on an all-time underdog run like the 1999 St. Louis Rams and the Greatest Show and Turf, but it certainly isn’t likely.
If they’re able to show that they can hang in tough games and that Murray has successfully rebounded to take the next step in his career, that counts as a win, even if their record doesn’t reflect it.
