The Cardinals hired a fired Big 12 coach and drafted a 5' 10" quarterback.
Those were the headlines in early 2019, and only sharpening the swords was the fact that all this happened just a year after Arizona went in on a longtime NFL assistant, in Steve Wilks, who’d paid his dues and earned the right to replace Bruce Arians, and drafted a well-pedigreed quarterback in Josh Rosen, whom they’d traded up to get in the first round. This, too, was after a year in which the Cardinals' talent level in certain spots looked XFL-worthy, and the team crumbled, falling all the way to the very bottom of the league at 3–13.
Bottom line, you could count on one hand the number of people who were convinced this newfangled plan of Arizona’s would actually work. And most of them were working down the hall from Kliff Kingsbury and Kyler Murray at the Cardinals’ headquarters in Tempe.
“I just felt like the decisions …” Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill said Thursday, carefully choosing his words. “… if you just stick with the principles, and that’s whatever’s best for the team is the right direction to go, that part made it easy. I knew there was going to be criticism. But in football, you gotta be willing to accept criticism. I knew it was coming. That wasn’t going to stop me from making the right decisions.”
Long story short, that exiled Big 12 coach is now the front-runner for NFL Coach of the Year. And that tree stump of a quarterback? He’s squarely in the race for league MVP.
This week, I did my annual poll of general managers and scouting directors, to gather who those inside the league see as most worthy of winning midseason awards, and you’re going to get those results a little later in the column. What I can tell you now, without revealing all the winners quite yet, is simple: The Cardinals’ decisions weren’t so wild after all.
Sure enough, Kingsbury was the clear choice of the execs for Coach of the Year. And Murray was neck-and-neck with Tom Brady and Lamar Jackson for MVP. Meanwhile, Rosen is a backup in Atlanta and Wilks is defensive coordinator at the University of Missouri.
It’s safe now to say that the tough calls of three years ago in Arizona were the right ones.
