Arizona Cardinals Face True Super Bowl-or-Bust Season with Big Decisions Looming

With the (glaring) exception of the way it ended, the 2015 season was a great success for the Arizona Cardinals. The team won a franchise-record 13 regular-season games, winning the NFC West and securing a first-round playoff bye (also for the first time in team history).

That big season cemented the status of head coach Bruce Arians and general manager Steve Keim as one of the best duos in the league. But that big season has also led to big expectations. Simply put, anything less than a trip to Houston and Super Bowl LI would be considered a disappointment.

Those expectations are far from the only pressure on the Redbirds this season. There’s another huge force pressing on the Cardinals, squeezing them toward either a trip to Texas or a round of “what ifs?” and head-shaking.

The forces of change in the NFL…

Because one way or the other, the Arizona Cardinals are all but surely going to be a much different football team one year from now.

Free agency is something every NFL team has to deal with in the salary-cap era of the NFL. The collective bargaining agreement signed in 2011 added a new wrinkle. Now it isn’t just veteran free agents knocking on the doors of huge paydays. Younger players with expiring rookie deals now want their piece of the pie, and the exponential explosion of their contracts from Year 4 (or 5) to the next can be difficult to squeeze under the cap.

Those lower rookie contracts have made it easier for teams to build around high-priced superstars, but sooner or later the bill becomes due.

And boy oh boy is the bill coming due for the Cardinals.

They say that defense wins championships, and the Cardinals were spurred to the NFC West crown last year in large part due to a unit that ranked fifth in total defense and seventh in scoring defense. It’s a defense bookended in the front by defensive end Calais Campbell and in the back by versatile defensive back Tyrann Mathieu.

Both are set to hit free agency after the 2016 season.

The 29-year-old Campbell, who has played his entire eight-year career in Arizona, tallied 61 tackles and five sacks last year en route to being named the No. 8 3-4 defensive end in the NFL by Pro Football Focus. He told NFL.com that his wish is to finish his career where it started:

I very much hope to be a Cardinal my whole career. It’s hard to do, and there’s a lot of prestige that comes with staying with one team your whole career. … I would really like to be one of those guys that gets a chance to, and, I mean, it’s always tough because it’s the business side of the game. But I still feel like I’m in the prime of my career, going into Year 9. I’m a veteran, I like to joke around like I’m old, but I feel great — I feel fantastic.

I feel like I have a lot of good years left in me, and I would love to spend them in Arizona and trying to bring the Bird Gang a championship.

Mathieu, on the other hand, has gone from being one of the riskiest picks of the 2013 NFL draft to one of the league’s biggest difference-makers in the secondary. Mathieu, who sees significant playing time at both cornerback and safety, was PFF’s top-ranked corner in 2015. A panel of analysts at NFL.com recently named Mathieu the league’s top safety in 2016.

For his part, …

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