How Cardinals’ Early Mistakes Set Up Late-Game Heartbreak

The Arizona Cardinals lost another close, one-score game on Sunday. This time, it was of the overtime variety, falling 27-24 to the Jacksonville Jaguars.

It was yet another contest in which one can’t help but think “they should have won that game” on numerous occasions. There were opportunities aplenty for the Cardinals to take a commanding lead, and opportunities to engineer a walk-off thriller. Neither of those hypotheticals became realities.

Initially, it would appear that the glaring individual plays in the waning seconds of the game were the perpetrators of another disappointing Monday morning.

But, as much as Sunday’s loss felt all-too-familiar in terms of large-scale single-instance mistakes, it was the less-noteworthy, early-game issues that set the Cardinals up for heartbreak.

Cardinals’ Early Mistakes Set Up Costly Loss

It’s easy to point to the most prominent individual instances as the main reasons for the defeat.

For one, a big play by WR Michael Wilson late in the fourth set them up for a potential winning score, down 24-21 with no timeouts and the clock winding. Rather than spiking the ball to provide themselves with up to three shots at the end zone, the operation was slow, and they ran an unsuccessful no-huddle pass play.

With six seconds, head coach Jonathan Gannon opted to kick the field goal, rather than go for the kill.

“I always think you put pressure on the defense, especially after an explosive, to run a play and not get in a huddle. That’s one thing. I would have liked to see us… get it off a little bit quicker,” Gannon said.

“At that point, where you are with six seconds with no timeout, depending on what the defense does, I think you’re putting the team in harm’s way there, truthfully. … It can be a coin flip [to run another play], and I didn’t love it.”

Then, of course, there was the 4th & 4 play in overtime. QB Jacoby Brissett launched a deep ball to WR Xavier Weaver rather than simply going for the first down. The pass was broken up to end the game.

But for as much as those two individual situations seemed to be the culprits of the loss, the process began much earlier in the game. It was little mistakes and the less-obvious missed opportunities that led to those plays even carrying that much weight.

To end the first half, the Cardinals faced a very similar situation to the one they had at the end of the fourth quarter — sitting on the Jacksonville 15 with less than 30 seconds to play. The Jaguars brought a zero blitz twice, and on the second, Weaver was wide open in the end zone — Brissett simply missed him.

Chad Ryland would go on to uncharacteristically miss a 33-yard field goal. Those three points (that could have been seven) aside, that one possession may have set in motion both of the above-mentioned last-minute shortcomings.

Gannon cited that possession when talking about the decision to kick the field goal in the fourth.

“They [zero blitzed] us twice in a row at the end of the half there, you get a [zero blitz] with trying to get an up-and-down ball twice on the 11, you might not love that, either. You get a sack and you don’t get it to overtime, and you don’t feel good about doing that,” Gannon said.

In that moment, Gannon wanted to prevent disaster.

But in overtime, there was another opportunity. The Jaguars had been bringing heavy pressure on late downs, so the Cardinals ran a similar deep-shot play to Weaver. In concept, it could have given Brissett the same look as the play he overthrew Weaver on to end the first half. Except Jacksonville didn’t blitz.

Brissett’s throw was slightly delayed as a result of the — perhaps unexpected — lack of pressure, giving a second Jaguars defender time to peel off his man and make a play on the ball.

“The two coverages that we were expecting, we knew that was going to be a one-on-one to, in my mind, win the game,” Gannon said.

Of course, it was much more than just those two plays — and that is precisely the point. Those instances simply stand out as the ripple effect of poor mid-game execution. The loss was a collective effort of missed opportunities.

Arizona managed four turnovers on the day, but scored just seven offensive points off those turnovers. In fact, they scored only 17 offensive points on the day. NFL teams are a collective 50-1 in the last 25 years when managing a +4 turnover differential, and Sunday’s game was the first such occurrence in that time frame.

And even the defense, which admittedly had its best performance in weeks, had its moments of poor execution. Despite pinning the Jaguars on their own 3-yard line in the first quarter (tied at 0-0) Arizona allowed Trevor Lawrence and co. to march down the field in five explosive plays.

Gannon noted that as the issue that stood out to him more than the two more incendiary late-game situations.

“These games that are coming down to one-score games, you can look at a couple plays here or there, but I showed the defense the first drive. They’re backed up and five plays later it’s 7-0, and really not for anything schematically they did,” he said.

The point is, as poor as some of the Cardinals’ late-game management and playcalls may have been, it’s still ultimately the result of a team not playing complementary, buttoned-up football for the duration of the 60-plus minute contest.

The difference — as painful as it is — is that elite, well-coached teams find ways to overcome those mistakes and come away with a win. Somehow, that’s what the Jaguars, and not the Cardinals, did on Sunday.