Not the kind of take-aways the Browns did to the Cardinals, but similar
I’ll be honest, the first half was, to quote the great Randy Quaid in the equally great Days of Thunder “You look like a bunch of monkey’s [expletive] a football out there.” And so the Cardinals did, for the first 30 minutes, save for the 10 points they somehow managed to score, the team was just awful. If memories of the St. Louis and Pittsburgh games cropped back up, they should have, we were in for a long afternoon.
But, something happened.
The Cardinals stopped playing with footballs, stopped dropping them, stopped missing open receivers with them, and put them into the hands of the playmakers and put those playmakers in the end zone.
The Cardinals 24 unanswered second half points, while holding the Browns to no points and under 100 offensive yards in the second half was the type of team they need to be as we reach the exponentially harder portion of their schedule.
There are a lot of things to work on with two weeks off, Scott touched on some of them here, mainly reducing turnovers for everyone, but that defense also needs some work as well. As things average out, the big plays are in the minority, but when coverage breaks down and a DB makes a great play on the ball, only to give up a touchdown on the very next play after being destroyed in coverage, the word that comes to mind was on the mind of Larry Fitzgerald after the game:
Consistency.
The team needs to figure out who they are and what they want to do, for the second year in a row they’re 6-2, granted the bye was at a different point in the season for them, but they have all the tools in place, they’re beating bad teams, they’re sticking around with good ones, but they should, could be 8-0 with a few last minute decisions done differently in Pittsburgh and St. Louis.
Last year this team ran the NFC for a majority of the season, this year they’re projecting to be a third or fourth seed (right now) if they can keep the division in hand.
And that is the real test of what the rest of the season will look like in Week 10, a Sunday Night, prime-time matchup with Seattle Seahawks who barely scrapped by in Dallas to a Tony Romo-less Cowboys team who needed a few first downs to seal the deal and couldn’t do it.
The Arizona Cardinals are, on paper and the highlight reel, a better team than the Seahawks, but both teams are lacking in consistency right now.
There’s a lot of questions for the team over the next two weeks, here’s hoping they can get something figured out on both sides of the ball, there’s always room for improvement, especially when it comes to taking away the big play, and holding on to the damn ball, but only to hold it, don’t get any funny ideas with it.