Short-Handed Cardinals in Full-On Desperation Mode as Season Slips Away

When the 2016 NFL schedule was announced, Thursday’s Week 5 matchup between the Arizona Cardinals and the San Francisco 49ers appeared a lopsided affair—a walk in the park for a Cardinals team expected to be among the league’s best against a Niners squad expected to be among the worst.

As often as not, things don’t work out in the NFL like we thought they would. While we appear to have been spot-on about the 49ers, a reeling Redbirds team heads into the game short-handed and in desperation mode.

To say that not many people expected Thursday’s game to be a battle for last place in the NFC West is an understatement. The Cardinals didn’t just enter 2016 as the favorites in their division; in the eyes of many, they were the favorites to represent the NFC in Super Bowl LI after winning a franchise-record 13 games in 2015.

Instead, after falling 17-13 to the first-place Los Angeles Rams last week, the Cardinals have lost as many games in a month as they did all of last season. At 1-3, a playoff trip that seemed almost predestined not too long ago is suddenly hanging by a thread.

Despite the team’s struggles early this season, Arizona head coach Bruce Arians insisted to Darren Urban of the team’s website that neither he nor his players are panicking:

We are not panicking. We are going to show up for work (Monday) because we have a game Thursday night against a very good team. We don’t have time to dwell on this one. We only have time to watch the film. We’ll be at work at 8 o’clock in the morning trying to get better and get a win.

The sky is not falling for us. I’m sure it is for a bunch of the fans. I am as disappointed as they are, but we have a game Thursday night.

It may well be that the Cardinals should be panicking a little. This early-season stretch was supposed to be relatively easy. The New England Patriots (whom the Cardinals lost to in Week 1) were the only team in Arizona’s first six games that made the postseason in 2015. Five of the team’s first seven games are at home, where the Cards went 6-2 last year.

Instead, Arizona has only a win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to show for three home tilts, and the team is struggling in facets of the game it excelled at last year.

Defensively, at least, the Cardinals are essentially the same team they were last year in most categories. Yes, they’ve slipped to eighth in the league in total defense from fifth a season ago. But their scoring defense is only fractionally worse than …

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