Sometimes, the truth hurts. Just ask Cardinals running back Kenyan Drake, who was asked where the Cardinals’ 10 penalties for 115 yards during Thursday night’s 28-21 loss at the Seahawks hurt the most.
“We didn’t win. That’s where it hurt the most,” Drake said, bluntly.
He’s right, too. If the Cardinals don’t commit half of the penalties they did at Lumen Field, especially a particular sequence of four that led directly to points, they would be 7-3 right now and holding at the very least, a share of first place in the NFC West.
But penalties have been this team’s bugaboo since the start of the season and it isn’t getting any better It’s actually getting worse. If the Cardinals don’t make the playoffs, blame it on the dirty yellow laundry that keeps getting sprayed all over the field like the work of the neighborhood tomcat.
If the trend keeps up over the final six games of 2020, they’re going to tinkle away their playoff chances and only have themselves to blame.
“We have to be better,” quarterback Kyler Murray said of the ongoing penalty problem. “We say every week to give ourselves the best possible chance to win the game and that (the excessive penalties) doesn’t help you.”
Entering the weekend, the Cardinals led the entire NFL with a staggering 94 flags, 13 more than the next-closest offender, the Bills. Of those nearly 100 penalties, a league-leading 79 have been accepted against Arizona for 644 yards.
For the Cardinals, trying to play a clean game is like trying to find a PlayStation 5.
“Yeah, it’s something we have to be better at, there’s no question,” coach Kliff Kingsbury said the day after the loss to Seattle. “You look at some, our effort, sometimes there’s a hold or a facemask when guys are trying to make a tackle. Things like that come up during the course of a game. But the pre-snap penalties, the personal foul penalty, you can’t have those and expect to win week in and week out.
“We have too many of that variety and we have to get it cleaned up as coaches and players and we’ve got to all take it upon ourselves. The only way it’s going to get fixed is to practice it the right way and then have it translate to the games.”
The problem is, it’s almost too late for that now. With only six games remaining, the Cardinals may have to win five of them and finish 11-5 to have a realistic chance of making the playoffs. Even with an extra team qualifying for the postseason in each conference this year, going 10-6 in the NFC might not be enough to cut it.
It makes every single game from here on out more paramount than ever, starting this coming Sunday when the Cardinals travel to Foxborough, Mass. to take on Bill Belichick and the Patriots. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Patriots, whom Kingsbury said are led by “the best coach of all time,” are the least-penalized team in the league.
They’ve had just 36 penalties called against them for just 358 total yards. They’ve had only eight pre-snap penalties count against them compared to the Cardinals’ league-leading 30.
“It’s a huge challenge, there’s no doubt,” Kingsbury conceded. “He’s got those guys playing good week in, week out. You see these multiple looks he’s throwing at people, defensively, so it’s going to be a heck of a challenge for our team to go up there and try to bounce back.”
Hall of Fame quarterback and FOX NFL’s lead game analyst Troy Aikman, who called Thursday night’s Cardinals-Seahawks game alongside play-by-play man Joe Buck, has said he loves what he’s seen out of Murray, Kingsbury and a handful of players on Arizona’s defense.
Aikman just isn’t sure the Cardinals are ready to be legitimate contenders just yet and he might be right, considering how undisciplined this squad continues to be.
“I do think they’re on the upswing. I don’t think they’re the best they’re going to be,” Aikman said Friday on the Rich Eisen Show, adding with this important caveat, “But I believe that they’re probably a year away from really beginning to be the team I believe they can be with the personnel they have.”
Maybe if it weren’t for all the penalties, things would be different. But the continuous false starts along the offensive line, the regular defensive holding calls and pass-interference flags by the secondary, plus the occasional personal fouls like the costly taunting flag Thursday night on cornerback Dre Kirkpatrick, have proven to be weekly killers.
“Yeah, that’s one’s disappointing,” Kingsbury said of Kirkpatrick’s penalty, which turned a pivotal fourth-and-short situation in the fourth quarter into an automatic first down for the Seahawks with the game on the line. “To put the team in that situation, it just can’t happen. We’ve got to control our emotions better in that situation.”
General Manager Steve Keim said recently that he thinks his players have “done well handling adversity,” but in the same breath he added, “We have not even played close to our potential.”
“We continue to shoot ourselves in the foot with pre-snap penalties, post-snap penalties, just the penalties alone, mistakes, a lack of execution at times,” Keim said Wednesday before the Seahawks’ game on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM. “Once we put that all together again, it could be scary.”
When your team is averaging 9.4 penalties per game this late in a season, things are scary enough.
Notes
— Free-agent veteran defensive lineman Domata Peko Sr. has passed through the COVID-19 protocol process and on Monday, it was announced he formally has signed with the Cardinals. Peko Sr., now in his 15th NFL season, comes to Arizona after having played for the Ravens (2019), Broncos (20017-18) and Bengals (2006-16).
In 208 career games (189 starts), he has totaled 599 tackles, 39 for loss, 20 sacks, 49 quarterback hits, 14 passes defensed, five fumble recoveries and two forced fumbles. A fourth-round pick out of Michigan State, he was voted a team captain for eight consecutive seasons in Cincinnati.
— Kingsbury said Monday that Murray is working through his right shoulder issue and is hopeful the quarterback responds well when the team returns to practice on Wednesday.
“We’ll see where we’re at practice-wise, if we need to make any adjustments, or if he can cut it loose,” he said.
Have an opinion on the Arizona Cardinals? Reach McManaman at bob.mcmanaman@arizonarepublic.com and follow him on Twitter @azbobbymac. Listen to him live on Fox Sports 910-AM every Tuesday afternoon at 3:30 on Calling All Sports with Roc and Manuch.
News and information you can trust. Start your online subscription.
The Link LonkNovember 23, 2020 at 11:33PM
https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/nfl/cardinals/2020/11/23/dirty-laundry-too-many-penalties-costing-arizona-cardinals/6390621002/
Dirty laundry: Penalties adding up for Arizona Cardinals, and it needs to get 'cleaned up' - The Arizona Republic
https://news.google.com/search?q=Laundry&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
No comments:
Post a Comment