Things were going so well for the Arizona Cardinals early this season. They were 6-3 and sitting in first place in the NFC West. They were coming off an impressive win against the Buffalo Bills, and all signs pointed to them being able to compete in the playoffs.
But then everything changed. The Cardinals offense, which was ranked first in the league up to that point, fell off the map. After their hot start, Arizona ended 2-5 and ultimately missed the playoffs in demoralizing fashion. Many blame the sudden self-destruction of the team on second-year head coach Kliff Kingsbury. While some of the criticism is unwarranted, one can build a strong case against him by looking at how his teams have finished every year he’s been a head coach, dating back to his Texas Tech days:
2013: 1-5
2014: 2-8
2015: 2-4
2016: 2-6
2017: 2-6
2018: 0-5
2019: 2-7 (Cardinals)
2020: 2-5
Just to be clear, Kingsbury has made significant progress with the team from where it started in his short tenure with the team. He inherited a 3-13 squad and took them within a hair of the postseason in just two years. Nonetheless, the evidence is pretty damning. His teams, and especially his offenses, aren’t able to compete throughout the course of a season. What’s equally frustrating is that every single one of the aforementioned teams started out .500 or above. Of course, there are many factors that go into that, especially for college teams, but when you’ve had the opportunity to coach elite talents such as Patrick Mahomes, Kyler Murray and Deandre Hopkins, you would expect to have stronger closings.
That all being said, Kingsbury does excel at developing players, especially quarterbacks. Mahomes, Murray, and Browns QB Baker Mayfield are all current products of his work that are producing at a high level in the NFL, and college superstars such as Case Keenum, Johnny Manziel, and Davis Webb all can have their roots traced back to Kingsbury. And the strong starts his teams get off to can definitely be accredited to him making an overall game plan that suits his players well.
That said, his struggles are obvious. He takes on the extreme workload of being an NFL head coach and offensive coordinator, which means his responsibilities include (but aren’t limited to) play calling, game planning, game managing, developing and building relationships with every player on the roster and making roster decisions. There are teams in the NFL that have three or four coaches for these responsibilities, but Kingsbury was thrust into this role in his first year as a coach of any type in the league. And the results are felt pretty drastically on a week by week basis, with mind-boggling decisions being made the norm to Cardinals fans this year. It also doesn’t help that Arizona was the most penalized team in the NFL this year, averaging 7.1 flags a game. Game plans don’t seem to change much on a week-by-week basis. There is inconsistency in strategy, and decisions that obviously need to be made aren’t made for weeks or even months (such as the incorporation of a play-action passing game, expanding Deandre Hopkins’ route tree, or switching kicking responsibilities.)
The most evident examples of this failure to adapt in my opinion came in the final two games of the season, against division rivals San Francisco and Los Angeles. Both teams were severely hampered by injuries, but in neither game did it seem the Cardinals would target the backups that were being forced to take meaningful snaps. Against the 49ers, Kingsbury seemed ultra-aggressive, going for it on fourth down an astonishing six times (and converting four times.) Except there were still moments of conservative play calling that made no sense — screen passes on 2nd-and-long in their own territory (just to go for it on 4th and medium), Kyler Murray still not running at the same frequency as he did early in the season, a lack of deep shots taken, and not sticking to the run game which was excelling early in the game are just a few examples of decisions made that were heavily questioned after the 20-12 loss. Obviously, some of those calls are products of the air raid offense that is still being implemented in the NFL, but Kingsbury showed last year he was willing to stray from that style of offense in order to win games when Arizona became a run-first team in the second half of the season. Against Los Angeles, the offense completely fell apart after Kyler Murray went down on the first drive of the game. The next three quarters would be a complete debacle. Backup QB Chris Streveler would only account for 89 yards in 42 minutes, 53 seconds and would take a safety and throw a back-breaking pick-6 right before the half en route to an 18-7 Cardinals loss. Kingsbury seemed to stick with his game plan which involved Kyler Murray, despite Streveler having not practiced with the starting unit all season. Streveler was a talented runner in the CFL and yet he was only given three rushing attempts. Streveler seemed to have good poise in the pocket but obviously hadn’t developed the internal clock in his head that quarterbacks use to know when it’s time to make a decision, yet we still dropped him into our end zone on a crucial drive. Streveler obviously is not Kyler Murray but there was no apparent change in strategy from the first 15 games of the season that utilized Streveler’s skillset. These are nitpicks that look a lot worse in hindsight, but the sheer number of these mistakes makes me come to this conclusion: Kingsbury needs help.
There is a big camp of Cardinals fans that are currently begging for Kingsbury’s firing, but I’m not in that camp yet. What I would suggest to management is that Kliff very obviously needs help, rather it come in the form of an OC, a designated play caller, or any other sort of creative solution they come up with. But the overarching problem of not being able to finish, rather it is seasons or games, cannot continue with this team that is set to compete for a Super Bowl in the next couple of years. Chiefs OC Eric Bieniemy, Panthers OC Joe Brady, Titans OC Arthur Smith, and Bills OC Brian Daboll are all awesome options, but they are all being considered for head coaching positions for other teams. The only way I can imagine these coaches considering Arizona is if Kingsbury was demoted to OC, which comes with a flurry of problems of its own. LT DJ Humphries spoke favorably of Kingsbury the day after the end of the season, accrediting the Cardinals’ “light years of progression” to him.
The best option I see is to look into an offensive-minded college coach who would be willing to serve as an assistant. Iowa State HC Matt Campbell, Northwestern University HC Pat Fitzgerald, and Ohio State OC Kevin Wilson all fit that category and should be targeted by the Cardinals in my opinion.
There is still a long offseason ahead of us, and Arizona will boast a much different NFL team than they did Sunday at the end of it. But the first step in this reform for a team that has 28 pending free agents is in coaching.
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