TRADE OF THE WEEK: WEEK 2 Carr Crashing Raiders Lose by Lightning Strikes

Prior to facing the Las Vegas Raiders and their Carr crashes I decided that after Cardinals curious case of the missing playbooks last week I couldn’t bear to potentially watch another embarrassing game to start out the season. So I broke the emergency glass and decided to pull out an old trick passed down to me by my father and his father before him. The plight of the Arizona Sports fan is well known and across the decades we have developed practices to mitigate the embarrassment throughout the season, including listening to the game on radio instead of watching. Yes that’s right, the Cardinals were so bad in week 1 that I needed to resort to Ron Wolfley and Dave Pasch to broadcast and illustrate the game for me. There is no one quite like Ron Wolfley in sports media, yet there are hundreds just like him in local news stations across the nation, lurking on hidden radio waves waiting for truckers to pass through their coverage area, and even sometimes chumming it up with the other XL patrons at the local city bar. If you are lucky enough to have your own Ron Wolfley at your local Zipps or Majereles, buy that man a drink before you lose him to cardiac arrest or a DUI. Ron Wolfley is the type of drinker where even Mark Grace says, “Okay I need to slow down now Ron. I still need to drive home later” It is both a blessing and a curse to have Ron Wolfley as a color commentator for your events but in these troubling times he is the man who I turned to.

Listening to Wolfley it seemed like the Cardinals were successful on every single play even if it was a negative outcome for the visiting team. That’s the magic of Wolfley. He has a way of navigating the broadcast across the choppy airwaves and saying nothing while he excitedly verbalizes the game taking place before him. As the rugged voice of Wolfley penetrated my ears millions of viewers watched the Cardinals fail to penetrate on Defense, and on Offense if you can believe it. For the second week in a row Kyler Murray came up short and failed to average his height in passing yards coming in at 5.7 yards per pass. This is notable as he only fell short twice in his 2021 campaign which ended with a performance coming in at 4.0. This is the third game in a row dating back to the same playoff performance and its notable that this is the only time in Kyler’s short-lived career that he has failed to at least average 3 games in a row. This is only the third time that this streak has occurred in Kyler’s career and now it is the longest. In 2019 and 2020 Kyler had back-to-back games in weeks 3 and 4 and weeks 12 and 13, respectively, where he failed to average his height in yards per pass.

Is this the early warning sign that Kyler is going to come up short of expectations this season when the city of Phoenix expected so much from him? Before the Cardinals embarrassing loss to the Rams in the postseason last year, Kyler said he needed to have a big game for the Cards to win. The media wrote after that game how perhaps the moment was too big for him and maybe it was too much pressure. Where is the pressure now? Kyler Murray’s impressive scrambles were only necessary because he can’t understand the defensive reads and is forced to improvise on those plays. Kyler Murray is beginning to give off theater kid vibes. He can look and act like a football player but at the end of the day when he hangs up his cleats he goes home to an empty house, throws on some anime, and starts to game with his clan.

The Raiders implosion is all too familiar to Cardinals fans. It is hard to celebrate bright spots in the Cardinals performance as the flashes of success occurred as lightning strikes. You wouldn’t believe the flashes were real if the roar of the crowd wasn’t silenced in seconds like thunder rolling off the clouds. It seemed as if the Raiders ate local Las Vegas edibles at halftime and were slow to react to the Cardinals plays after they kicked in in the fourth quarter. Overall, the Cardinals improved in the second half while the Raiders got stoned. Shout out to Planet 13 Laboratories in Las Vegas for the boost.

Lastly, why are all our best offensive players so short? Kyler Murray, Greg Dortch (who?), and marquise brown are all 5ft 10in or shorter. It’s no wonder our offense isn’t having any success when we are using sedans to transport a package 100 yards across a collision course filled with lifted trucks, fat hummers, and old military vehicles which can’t be insured anymore.

Trade of the Week: Kyler Murray

It may be early but Kyler Murray is officially on the trading block. If you love athletic quarterbacks who can scramble like no one else, then Kyler Murray may be the quarterback for your team. Kyler is on the trading block after this performance as he is now on a three-game streak of failing to average his height in passing yards. This is the first time this has happened in Kyler’s career and given how the season is going thus far, I do not think it will be the last.

Bright spot of the week: Deandre Hopkins led his team of receivers from the sideline this weekend and helped Dortch and Brown prepare for their TD receptions while also staying healthy. With this approach of long-term strategic thinking there’s no telling what heights this Cardinal will fly to when he is healthy.