The whispering quarterback whispered, and his intended target yelled back. Less than a year after Cliff Kingsbury extended the 2027 NFL season, the Arizona Cardinals fired their fourth-year head coach after a 4-13 season that included a widening gap with the once (and possibly future; anything is possible) star quarterback . Kyler Murray.
In four seasons, Kingsbury led Arizona to the playoffs once, in 2021, where the Los Angeles Rams thrashed the Cardinals 34-11 in the NFC Wild Card Game and took Kingsbury’s once-vaunted offense to 183 yards. The former Texas Tech coach finished with a 28-37-1 record with the Cardinals.
The writing was on the wall just before Christmas when the young head coach was asked about his time at the helm of football teams. He directed the Texas Institute of Technology for six years and was in his fourth year in Arizona at the time.
“Looks like 100,” he said. This man is only 43 years old.
The comment followed a strange year for the Cardinals and Kingsbury. After Murray’s poor run against the Rams last January, questions arose about the Heisman Trophy winner’s ability to win a major tournament. Anything — many of us just can’t win a Super Bowl — except that Murray recently signed a five-year, $230.5 million contract that, as of this writing, hasn’t even kicked in yet.
The Texas-raised coach — Kingsbury starred at New Braunfels High School — was under pressure to surround his talented but struggling quarterback from Allen, in North Texas, with the weapons he needed to succeed. Without All-Pro wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins in the first six games of the season by suspension, the Cardinals traded a 2022 first-round pick for Murray’s former Oklahoma teammate Marquis Brown, and drew up a second-round tight end with the most appalling The image from Wikipedia can be imagined.
The hype led HBO to choose the Cardinals for their annual show. Big hits in the season row. It was the last regrettable decision for the struggling media company as the Cardinals were still falling short, losing seven in a row to close out the season and losing to Murray in Week 14 with an ACL injury. Before that, the coach and his star guard had a public falling out in what is now the most memorable moment of the forgotten 2022 season.
Even the circumstances surrounding Kingsbury’s hiring were strange. Following his dismissal from Texas Tech in 2018, USC hired Kingsbury as the next offensive coordinator. A month later, he became the head coach of the Cardinals, effectively turning his dismissal from the middle Big 12 team into an NFL head coaching job.
If Kingsbury is any kind of aggressive wizard, then this is the greatest magic he has ever unleashed.
