TEMPE, Ariz. — When the Arizona Cardinals allow themselves to finally take a breath after the season, whether that’s on a beach in Cabo or on a couch in Arizona, and start dissecting how 2025 went, they’ll keep coming back to one question.
What went wrong?
For a team that won eight games in 2024 and had playoff aspirations, this season fell far below expectations. At 3-13, the Cardinals have tied their worst record in the modern era. A loss Sunday will give them their worst single-season record since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger.
The initial diagnosis of how and why this season went off the rails will produce the obvious reasons, starting with injuries. By Week 16, just four of the Cardinals’ Day 1 starters remained. The rest? Injured. And heading into the season finale Sunday against the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium, they have 22 players on injured reserve — including the starting quarterback, the top two running backs, two of the top four tight ends, both starting offensive tackles and the 2025 first-round pick.
Then there’s the defense, which gave up 40 points three times in a five-game stretch followed by 37 two weeks later.
And, lastly, the offense will get its own evaluation, one that will look deeply at how it fared with Kyler Murray at quarterback for the first five weeks against how it performed from Week 6 on with Jacoby Brissett under center.
And, yet, they aren’t the full reasons why the Cardinals regressed in 2025 after steady growth from four wins in coach Jonathan Gannon’s first season in 2023 to eight in Year 2. This season’s decline has been due, in very large part, to one force: The Cardinals themselves.
“You can go back to however many games, even in some of the games where we won where we just didn’t succeed on the drive, it’s been like, ‘Why didn’t we succeed? Oh, well, we did this wrong, or I did this wrong,'” Brissett said. “It’s never been (that) they just outschemed us, outplayed us or anything like that.”
The story of the Cardinals’ season will be the weekly struggle to correct prior mistakes along with the ability to continue making new ones each game. For a team that believed it was a division contender heading into the season, how 2025 has unfolded has left Arizona’s locker room consistently frustrated.
Brissett said there were times, such as during the Cardinals’ 45-17 loss to the Rams in Week 14 that he would look at plays on the tablet on the sideline and think: “They didn’t have anything to do with that.”
It was, simultaneously, frustrating and encouraging.
Yes, encouraging.
“Because it’s just like, ‘All right, let’s just focus on us,'” Brissett said. “We’ve had a good week of preparation. Obviously, coaches put us in a good situation and now we just have to execute it.”
Publicly, Gannon has fallen on the sword, saying — usually in his postgame opening comments — that Arizona needs to be coached better while polishing and fixing the details. It’s reached a point where he sounds like a broken record. and he knows it.
“A little bit when you’re losing for me at least,” he said. “You’re trying to do everything that you can. How can I impact winning? You try to make some tweaks here or there. You keep a good attitude. You keep the right mindset. You do your job at a high level. It’s hard when you’re not getting the results you want, but no one’s going to jump off the diving board. I know that.”
Gannon has made changes, albeit none the fan base has been clamoring for, such as firing assistants. Before the season, he altered the team’s travel schedule for road games so they fly earlier on travel days than in the past and hold a walkthrough in the city they’re playing in as opposed to holding the walkthrough in Arizona and then getting on a plane, like they did during his first two seasons. Then Gannon changed the daily schedule after Thanksgiving, packing in meetings before practice on Thursdays and Fridays so players could go home whenever practice was over. It made Fridays a bit busier than before the changes and has drawn mixed reviews in the locker room.
Yet, little that Arizona did led to wins this season. It started 2-0 with Murray at the helm and has gone 1-13 since. But why? Gannon said “there’s a lot of layers” to why the Cardinals’ process hasn’t translated to wins.
What the fallout from the season will be won’t be known until Monday morning, when owner Michael Bidwill would fire Gannon, if he does. It may not be until a week or two until staff changes, if they are made, are revealed.
But the biggest consequence of this season may not start unfolding until mid-March, when the Cardinals will have to make a decision whether to keep Murray on the roster. Then, in April, Arizona will face a franchise-shifting decision: To draft or not to draft a quarterback?
With an 83% chance of keeping a top-five pick, according to the ESPN Football Power Index, the Cardinals will be in prime position to draft one of the top three signal-callers. Heading into Week 18, the Cardinals own the fifth overall pick, putting them in a spot to potentially land Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza, Oregon’s Dante Moore or Alabama’s Ty Simpson. Depending on how the last weekend of the season goes, Arizona could find itself as high as No. 2.
But drafting a quarterback won’t be an isolated decision by general manager Monti Ossenfort — if he’s still in that role by April.
It’ll be in conjunction with what Arizona does with the rest of the quarterback room as well as hinge on whether Bidwill decides to make changes at head coach and general manager — or both.
Brissett is under contract for next season, but Arizona might look at bringing in another veteran to compete with Brissett to be a possible bridge quarterback and a mentor for a rookie. There are a number of veteran quarterbacks who’ll be on the market, including Teddy Bridgewater, Joe Flacco, Jimmy Garoppolo, Marcus Mariota, Malik Willis, Mitchell Trubisky and Russell Wilson. But what this season did for Brissett was give Arizona a long evaluation of him, but the results are a mixed bag. He’s won just once since taking over the starting role in Week 6, but on the other hand he’s also the top-ranked quarterback during that stretch. He’s ranked first in dropbacks, action plays, completions and attempts since Week 6, while being ranked second in passing yards and fifth in completion percentage above expected. And he’s done that while having a roster that’s been decimated by injuries.
What Arizona also gleaned from Brissett’s time at quarterback is how a quarterback of his stature — 6-foot-4 and 235 pounds — plays in offensive coordinator Drew Petzing’s scheme. All of that will speed up the process of Arizona deciding whether it wants to keep Brissett for 2026.
Unfortunately for Arizona, two of the four teams ahead of it as of now need a quarterback bad enough to take one high in the first round: the Las Vegas Raiders, who pick first overall, and the New York Jets, who pick third.
The New York Giants are at No. 2 but have their quarterback of the future in Jaxson Dart, and the Tennessee Titans are at No. 4 with last year’s No. 1 overall pick, Cam Ward, at QB.
In theory, Arizona should be able to pick one of three from among Mendoza, Moore and Simpson. Who, though, in reality, will still be on the board when they go on the clock is the biggest question.
Internally, Arizona has taken a liking to Simpson, a 6-foot-2 pocket passer.
However, the Cardinals could stay away from drafting a quarterback in the top five and shift their draft approach completely and focus on taking a quarterback later in the first round or even in the second.
There, Miami’s Carson Beck or LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier could be available if Arizona wanted to trade down or back in the first round or wait it out at the top of the second. Among Beck, Nussmeier and Simpson, Beck is the most opposite of the 5-10, 207-pound Murray, checking in at 6-4 and 220 pounds.
What could shake up how Arizona approaches its quarterback decision will be if Bidwill decides to fire either Gannon or Ossenfort or clean house completely.
If Bidwill fires Gannon, who has two years left on his contract, then the new coach will want to pick his own quarterback. However, there are some around the Cardinals who believe if Bidwill fired both Gannon and Ossenfort, then there’s an outside chance the new regime may decide it can run it back with Murray.
Gannon has continued to say he “absolutely” has been able to block out the noise about him being on the hot seat and is only concentrating on his job. He doesn’t let himself think about what could happen on Monday morning, but he said if he had to pitch himself to Bidwill to return for a fourth season it’d be simple.
“I believe in myself, and I believe in our team,” Gannon said. “We are at a dip right now, and we’re going through some adversity, but I do believe in us, and we’ll get out of the dip.”
