GM,
I grimaced just thinking about the lack of competition in the AFC West yesterday, so let's move on to a division that should have just as little parity but probably somehow won't. The Cardinals should win the division easily, right? Thanks to offseason displays of generosity, less annoying business practices, and fence mending, Arizona should be expected to have one of the most explosive offenses in football again and cruise to an easy divisional title, right? I now present a little list I'd like to call "Coulda, Shoulda, Won'ta: The 2009 Arizona Cardinals." All rights reserved.
1. Kurt Warner hasn't had complete, successful back-to-back seasons in his NFL career. Really! People say he's a Hall of Fame candidate, and I can't necessarily disagree, but his affinity for fumbling, getting injured, and unpredictably sucking make him remarkably less reliable than most of Canton's greats. If you can't count on Warner, it's over.
2. As far as I know, Anquan Boldin still isn't too happy about his contract. And though he looks like less of a hoodlum than other Pro-Bowl receivers, it's safe to assume he still wants the ball and the money.
3. The division is no longer a cakewalk. Seattle promises to be better with many key players returning from injury. San Francisco promises to be better, having won four of its last five in 2008. St. Louis promises to black out several games....
4. This one shouldn't shock anyone, but the Cardinals did happen to lose in the SuperBowl last year. In the last eight years, only one SuperBowl loser has made the playoffs! (Call me the News Breaker.)
5. We actually expect them to be good! Ask the 2003-2007 squads how that worked out.
-JW
JW,
Historically, we've disagreed about the significance of quarterback play in the NFL. While I maintain that QB is the single most important position in sports, you've got it ranked somewhere between WNBA Sixth Woman and PGA caddie. I hope we can both agree, though, that where the NFL draft is concerned, striking out with a first-round quarterback pick really can set your franchise back half a decade.
That's certainly what happened to the San Francisco 49ers, whose 2005 pickup of Alex Smith in the top slot has been about as haunting as a pedophilia conviction. During the Smith era, the Niners went 16-32 and fired their offensive coordinator after every season. Smith himself missed 16 starts due to injury and 365 passes due to sucking (I looked it up!). Now that San Francisco has engaged in a mercy killing of the J. T. O'Sullivan era, look for Shaun Hill to join his predecessors by playing badly when he bothers to suit up at all.
Sadly, the hopes of the Seattle Seahawks and the St. Louis Rams also rest on QBs who've spent the last several years on the wrong side of tolerable. I know that the Rams' problems in the trenches have been well documented (a search of "rams offensive line" +"bad" yielded 234,000 Google hits), but at some point we just have to start questioning Marc Bulger's ability to walk upright without falling. And while Matt Hasselbeck has certainly hinted at not sucking (his 2005 season was quite strong, in fact), he's missed 13 games in the last three seasons and is primed to become that guy we somehow decide is "tough" just because he's constantly injured (see McNair, Steve).
The Cardinals, on the other hand, have all the ingredients for a very fine season. If it weren't for that pesky Super Bowl curse (outlined here in some detail), I'd be pencilling them in for a trip to Miami. As it is, I'll go with you and predict disaster, regardless of whether or not it makes sense on paper.
-GM
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