The Arizona Cardinals kicked off “Phase Two” of their offseason on Monday. How so? By giving Josiah Deguara a one-year contract. Exciting, right?
Deguara has been in the NFL since the Green Bay Packers picked him (overall 94th) in the third round of the 2020 NFL Draft. An ACL injury ended his rookie year two games in.
In four years with Green Bay, he’d play 50 games (starting 10) to catch 47 passes for 436 yards and two touchdowns. In 2024, he signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars for an uneventful time that raised his career stats to 50 overall catches for 450 yards.
Exciting.
When announcing their new tight end, the Cardinals touted the importance of having “depth at that position.”
At first, I thought they barely added an inch when they needed at least a mile for offense. Deguara wasn’t bringing exceptional numbers. What depth. It felt like a whiff.
And then I remembered last season.
Depth As In Bodies, Not As In Talent?
The Cardinals’ tight end room is anchored by Trey McBride, who is the only one of the six players to have over 1,000 receiving yards in a single season.
Sure, Travis Kelce’s success has everyone thinking tight ends are meant to be thicker wide receivers who like making podcasts and having super-famous girlfriends.
But Cardinals’ offensive coordinator Drew Petzing clearly sees them as beefy blocking bulldozers, put on this earth to rip and tear through defensive lines so that the run game can pick up a few extra yards.
As Theo Mackie wrote for AZ Central in November 2024, the Cards used multiple TEs on 46% of offensive snaps, second only to the Chiefs. The Cards also had run 193 plays with multiple tight end sets, the most in the league, averaging 4.8 yards per carry. 130 of those then-193 plays were gap schemes, resulting in a “bruising, physical style” that punished defenses.
This new roster addition hints that Petzing isn’t deviating from the plan for 2025. “In an offense that uses 12 and 13 personnel 47 percent of the time, depth at that position is critical,” read the statement on Deguara’s signing. Having another TE means having another option for more plays requiring multiple tight ends.
Josiah will compete with Travis Vokolek, who has played only three games since signing with the team in 2023, and undrafted rookie Oscar Cardenas.
Tip Rieman and Elijah Higgins are the others in the TE room. Last season, they’ve danced between fullback and tight end (since Arizona doesn’t have a dedicated fullback).
Petzing doesn’t strike me like someone who played Starcraft, but he’s my age, so he might know what a “Zerg rush” is: an overwhelming burst for a short gain. Rinse and repeat. Had the plan held up and Arizona not collapsed after the bye week, I wouldn’t be so doubtful of its efficacy and question whether relying on it for 2025 is a good thing.
But maybe we’re overlooking something.
Maybe He Is…Special
The team’s announcement said Deguara “spent most of his tenure in the NFL as a special teams guy, logging over 800 snaps in that phase of the game.” An odd thing to highlight. It’s like saying that as a writer, I spent 800 hours making coffee.
But in 2024, the Cardinals ran 21 punt returns for 202 yards, resulting in an average of 9.6 yards per return. They only had one kickoff returned for a touchdown and averaged 28.4 yards per return. It’s not bad, but not great.
With Arizona boasting about Deguara’s special teams experience, maybe the team sees him as a way to get those numbers up. Let’s face it: he’s no threat for the starting position, unless McBride, Higgins, and Riemann suddenly get tariffed. Hell, Deguara’s competing with an undrafted rookie out of UTSA and a guy who has barely more on-field experience than that.
Maybe Arizona sees Degura as a way for Arizona to convert more punt returns to points? Or perhaps he’s just another body for Petzing to throw at a defensive line for another gap scheme? We’ll have to see.
Welcome to the team, Josiah.