The Arizona Cardinals lost their season opener in Week 1 in a 20-16 road loss to the Washington Commanders.
The offense was bad and the defense was good.
Buy Cardinals TicketsThe offensive struggles were expected, especially against one of the league’s best defensive front fours.
But we learned a lot about the defense.
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5 players always play, the rest rotate...a lot
The Cardinals have five players who will rarely come off the field. Safety Budda Baker, cornerbacks Marco Wilson and Kei’Trel Clark and linebacker Kyzir White all played every snap. Safety Jalen Thompson came off the field for only one play.
Everyone else was part of a rotation. Safety K’Von Wallace played 70% of the snaps but no one else even reached 60% of the snaps.
3 safeties
After the trade of Isaiah Simmons, how the Cardinals would handle nickel packages was a question mark. All offseason, Jalen Thompson would slide from safety to the slot and Simmons would come in.
Even with no Simmons, the Cardinals went with a three-safety defense a lot. Thompson covered the slot and K’Von Wallace would sub in for nickel defenses.
Big production from OLBs, D-linemen
The defensive linemen and outside linebackers combined for 29 tackles, six sacks, seven quarterback hits, five tackles for loss, an interception, two forced fumbles, two fumble recoveries and a defensive touchdown.
That’s good stuff from a pair of units with huge question marks entering the year.
Violent play
The way the defenders flew to the ball, hit and tackled the Commanders, it was impressive. I can’t recall another Cardinals team with such intensity and physicality on defense.
It cost them a couple of times with late hits but the message of football violence is getting across to the players.
A pretty traditional 3-4 look
The Cardinals play a pretty traditional 3-4 defense in the sense that their edge rushers do a lot of dropping into coverage. Perhaps because they don’t have a big-time, elite pass rusher, the mix of rush and drop creates confusion and forces offenses to have to guess where the pressure will come from.
They played pretty consistently with a five-man front,
