The Cardinals offense has hit a wall. That’s Kyler Murray’s theory, at least. The second-year quarterback was asked about Arizona’s struggles on offense after the team’s fourth loss in five games, and that was the only explanation he could come up with.
“We’ve kind of hit a wall, as far as offensively,” Murray said this week. “That first half of the season, it was kind of effortless. We were moving the ball, having fun, playing fast. When you face a little bit of adversity, how do you react? How do you adjust? Which we ended up doing, but it was just a little too late.”
While Murray is right that the Cardinals were much better offensively in the first half of the season, I voiced my concern that their success was far too dependent on Murray’s creativity out of structure. His improvised production was masking underlying issues that would be exposed if defenses were able to contain him.
Well, over the last few weeks, defenses have figured out how to contain him. Over the last three games — all losses — Murray has run for just 61 yards. Heading into that losing streak, he was averaging 67.1 yards per game. The underlying issues have been exposed, and it’s time for Kliff Kingsbury to make some adjustments in order to take some pressure off his diminutive signal-caller.
It doesn’t take too much digging to figure out what those issues are. I found two big ones that have quietly been festering all season.