Why would the Arizona Cardinals, who have an injured franchise quarterback, cut their only experienced backup QB to save essentially pennies in salary cap space? Why would they do that? This Arizona team isn’t creating space for the NFL equivalent of Kevin Durant. The Cardinals are doing quite the opposite.
The Cardinals seem to be tanking. They can’t say it. But their actions scream it.
On Monday, the Cardinals released veteran quarterback Colt McCoy, causing a stir big enough for NFL Twitter (X, technically) to pop off. First-year head coach Jonathan Gannon spent the majority of his 10-minute press conference talking about it, even if his answers amounted to coaching jargon jambalaya.
“Just like with every decision, we look at the, you know, full body of work,” Gannon said. “Evaluate our guys. Production goes into that, and, uh, felt like it was the best decision for the team to move forward with the guys we have in the room to help us win a football game.”
McCoy’s full body of work includes being the first-team quarterback for the Cardinals since the spring and throughout the preseason because Kyler Murray is still recovering from a torn ACL he suffered in December. McCoy, 36, has started six games in his two years with the Cardinals, his fifth NFL team in 12 years. He’s never been particularly good, nor has he started more than eight games in a season since 2011. But he’s an experienced veteran who has had to play every NFL down like it’s his last; he’s essentially everything you don’t want at the helm of an effective NFL tank job.
What’s left of the quarterback room for as long as Murray is sidelined is an inexperienced mess. Last week, the Cardinals swapped day-three picks in the 2024 draft with the Browns to acquire Joshua Dobbs, who has two NFL starts since being drafted in the fourth round in 2017. Dobbs will spend the next two weeks in what Gannon described as an “open competition” for the starting job with rookie fifth-rounder Clayton Tune; Gannon said he won’t name a starter ahead of the game to maintain a “competitive advantage” in Week 1. Left unsaid is what the Cardinals are truly trying to be competitive for, but it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to beat the Commanders.
The recent quarterback moves are just the latest steps in the Cardinals’ blatant pursuit of the no. 1 pick in 2024 (and, potentially, USC quarterback Caleb Williams), which started as soon as Murray was carted off the field in a Monday Night Football game late last season. Consider what has transpired since: General manager Steve Keim took an indefinite leave of absence (and later stepped away permanently), the team fired head coach Kliff Kingsbury and hired new GM Monti Ossenfort, and finally, Ossenfort hired Gannon immediately after the Super Bowl. Ossenfort then began reshaping the Cardinals roster—in part by getting younger and, in many cases, cheaper. The Cardinals cut veteran receiver DeAndre Hopkins and will now pay more than $21 million in dead money while he plays for the Titans. Arizona chose not to re-sign defensive lineman Zach Allen and cornerback Byron Murphy, who are now projected starters for their new teams, and only two teams spent less money than the Cardinals all offseason. Ossenfort recently traded away 2020 first-round pick Isaiah Simmons for a seventh-round pick and traded backup offensive tackle Josh Jones for a day-three pick next year, in addition to the deal to add Dobbs. All of those moves seem to have made what was already one of the worst rosters in football worse.
The result? The Cardinals’ current projected win total is two full games lower than any other team in the NFL, at 4.5. They also have the worst odds of any team in the league to make the playoffs.
We’ll know for sure that the Cardinals are looking ahead to 2024 when it’s time to make a decision on Murray’s 2023 season. Unsurprisingly, the team did not activate Murray this week, meaning he cannot play until at least Week 5. By then, will there be anything to play for? If Murray never suits up and Dobbs and/or Tune (hell, even David Blough might get a rep) make this a three-win team, it will be the feather in the cap of Ossenfort’s master plan, one that is objectively the best path forward for the Cardinals anyway.
Rushing Murray back from injury would be a bad decision under normal circumstances—a quarterback who relies on his legs as much as he does deserves to play at full health—and would be catastrophic in this case, as the Cardinals need to give themselves options for 2024. Playing Murray in hopes of winning seven or eight games is not worth risking his potential trade value or long-term health.
Let’s be clear: A successful tank would be the best long-term solution for this franchise, as painful as it might be to get there. The Cardinals are in position to control the top of the 2024 draft, with their own first-round pick (which, for the reasons we’ve laid out, should be very high) and the Texans’ first-round pick (which could be a high pick as well). Of course, it’s worth wondering whether this Cardinals organization is savvy enough to pull off the perfect tank job, or whether what’s going on in Arizona is less of a master plan and more of a mess.
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Tanking in the NFL is nearly impossible. Just look at how many teams have failed in recent years: from the 2020 Jets, who lost a chance at getting Trevor Lawrence when they won two games in late December; to last year’s Texans, who lost out on the no. 1 pick when their lame-duck head coach, Lovie Smith, went YOLO and played for the win in Week 18. Even joking about tanking is against NFL rules—just ask the Miami Dolphins. To successfully tank requires a roster full of players without guaranteed contracts to somehow play for a future that might not include them, and coaches to go against their competitive instincts. Organizations can tank—and the Cardinals have certainly taken the first steps to do so, whether they’ve meant to or not—but this is an organization full of, as Logan Roy would call them, very unserious people. This is a team that ranked second to last in the NFL Players Association quality-of-life survey earlier this year (Arizona was the only franchise to charge players for meals at the facility), and the team that included a homework clause in its franchise quarterback’s massive contract. This is a team that is being sued by former head coach Steve Wilks for racial discrimination and is facing an arbitration claim from another former front office employee about workplace misconduct issues, and a team that was docked a draft pick for illegally contacting Gannon—who was hardly in high demand—during the hiring process.
It would be easier to believe the Cardinals had a plan to tank if we had seen them resemble a functional franchise in other ways in the recent past. It seems more likely that they actually have no plan at all than it does that they are playing a chess game that will net them the no. 1 pick.
But believing that every move—and especially this most recent quarterback change—might be part of the most impressive tank job in recent NFL history is much more fun. Cardinals fans should embrace Ossenfort’s vision, if that’s what it is, because the alternative explanation for what’s happening is far more bleak. This three-win season will have been worth it if Caleb Williams is throwing touchdowns to Marvin Harrison Jr. in 2024.
