Plenty on the line for coach
It’s as inevitable as receiving offers to buy your house and extend your car’s warranty. Lose three football games in a month’s time, and the head coach and play caller are going to be treated with same amount of patience as phone solicitors.
And if head coach and play caller is the same person, with no track record of success on his resume, then you’re talking about Kliff Kingsbury, who’s had everything but his citizenship questioned as the Cardinals have descended from 5-2 to 6-5.
If 2019 was Kingsbury’s honeymoon, December 2020 is coming home to a sink full of dishes and picture windows so dirty that it looks like there is fog around Camelback Mountain.
How Kingsbury navigates the final five weeks of the season will be a defining moment in his Cardinals tenure.
Win at least three games, finish with a winning record for the first time in five years and likely make the playoffs, and this season will be have been a success.
Lose at least three, finish no better than .500 and miss the playoffs, and this season will be remembered for a disastrous second half.
Not that the Cardinals coach looks like he's under pressure.
If Kingsbury ever sweats, it’s during
his early morning workouts, not when answering questions from reporters about the importance of games in December and January.
“As we move forward in this last month, I just think the margin for error is smaller and smaller,” he said calmly this week, “and we have to be better and practice better and execute at a higher level when we get opportunities.”
A variation of the last part of that quote — “execute at a higher level when we get opportunities” — has been common after Cardinals losses over the past month. And with the three losses decided by a total of 13 points, there were plenty of opportunities.
“The thing is, we’ve had opportunities to win games in a variety of ways,” right tackle Kelvin Beachum said on Tuesday, “and we’ve lost games in a variety of ways.”
Tuesday, the Cardinals made two veterans, Beachum and linebacker De’Vondre Campbell, available to reporters from their homes via Zoom.
Both have experience with playoff teams, Campbell with the Falcons and Beachum with the Steelers, and both talked about the differences between football played in December versus September.
“This is real football,” Beachum said. “I’m not saying earlier in the year wasn’t real football, but we’re in playoff football right now. You have to find a way to win December to have a chance to be in the dance.”
“We have (five) games left and this is where you separate yourself,” Campbell said. “The beautiful thing about it is we control that. It’s not in anybody else’s hands. The thing I know about the playoffs, once you make it in, it doesn’t matter what your record was in the regular season.”
Independent of each other, both players talked about the need to be dialed in daily, in both meetings and practices.
After the loss last Sunday to the Patriots, much was made about Bill Belichick out-coaching Kingsbury, especially how Belichick schemed to take away quarterback Kyler Murray’s running options.
The Cardinals have counters to what the Patriots did, but didn’t execute them well enough, Beachum said.
“Situational football, which is where we lost the game this past Sunday,” Beachum said. “It’s making sure we’re in the right formation, we’re doing things from an adjustment standpoint to make sure we have the right angles. All those things play a role.”
Beachum and Campbell placed the onus on the players, but it falls on the coaches, too, especially Kingsbury.
Over the past two weeks, Kingsbury’s offense has started and stopped more often than a mail truck and accounted for just 38 points. In contrast, a defense missing four opening-day starters is playing as well as it has in two years under coordinator Vance Joseph.
That’s the state of the Cardinals as they enter their most difficult stretch of the season. Two games against the Rams (7-4) remain, including Sunday in Glendale. The Giants have won their last three games. The Eagles stink but the Cardinals finish the season against the 49ers (5-6), who are only a game behind in the wildcard race.
Making the playoffs will require Cardinals players to execute, no doubt. But players like nothing better than to be handed a game plan that works.
Kingsbury’s ability to do that over the next five weeks will be play a large part in determining what becomes of this season. And how much faith we should have in him when it ends.