Mitchell Trubisky, the CBS of quarterbacks
And: are the Cardinals a tight end away from contention?
Can a new tight end make the Cardinals a contender?
DeAndre Hopkins was supposed to help Kyler Murray make the leap.
The perennial All-Pro came to Arizona for a pittance after the Texans, unwilling to give him a raise, shipped him west along with a fourth-round pick for David Johnson and a second-rounder. Bill O’Brien’s glaring inability to gauge player value was the Cards’ gain. If Murray could continue the ascent that made him the 2019 offensive rookie of the year, this team was capable of a playoff run and possibly more.
That didn’t happen. Murray made modest improvements, but his sophomore season was dotted with big performances against bad defenses and disappointments vs. upper-crust secondaries. Hopkins averaged 95 receiving yards and 12.9 yards per catch in his first nine games, then suffered a relative slump to 78 yards and 11.4 YPC as his team fell out of the postseason with a 2-5 finish.
A star-studded defense also suffered from this “good, not great” syndrome. Chandler Jones played only five games due to injury, leaving the team’s pass rush in the hands of Haason Reddick (who broke through with 12.5 sacks) and, uh, Dennis Gardeck (who had seven). Even so, Budda Baker and Patrick Peterson helped keep this group hovering among the league’s top 10 units.
Despite plenty of reasons to be excited, the Cardinals only jumped to the middle of the pack and missed out on the postseason the same year Mitchell Trubisky took the Bears to a wild card bid. Head coach Kliff Kingsbury, heralded as a prodigy in the art of the ever-evolving NFL offense, oversaw the best defense he’s ever had in his coaching career and still failed to turn that into a winning record. In two years he’s 13-18-1 in the pros. If he can’t turn 2020’s progress into a 2021 playoff spot, it may spell the end of his career in Arizona.
It will be tough to make major adjustments given some important pending free agents, a receding salary cap, and a spot smack-dab in the middle of the draft. However, one significant addition could be exactly what Kingsbury needs to make his offense as good as he hopes it can be — and push the Cardinals to the top of a packed NFC West.
Arizona needs a tight end who will be more than just a space-filler
The Cardinals haven’t had a tight end catch 40 passes in a season since Rob Housler (ROB HOUSLER!) did so in 2012. This was a hole Bruce Arians could paper over with a prime(ish) Larry Fitzgerald and depth like Michael Floyd and John Brown behind him. In 2020, with Hopkins taking over 36 percent of the team’s non-running back targets, it became a bigger problem.
Opposing defenses understood stopping Arizona’s WR1 was the key to unraveling Kingsbury’s passing attack. Murray got better protection than he did in 2019 — his sack rate dropped from 8.1 percent to 4.6 and his pressure rate fell from 20 to 16 percent — but was unable to capitalize on this additional time late in the season. As a result, the Cards’ scoring output dropped from 29.6 points per game in a 6-3 start to 20.6 in a 2-5 finish.
This is a problem that can be mitigated with a little support from a crossing route-exploiting mismatch-creator of a tight end.
In 2020 that role fell mostly to Dan Arnold. Arnold was the kind of tight end who could only work as a starter in Kingsbury’s vertical system. At 6’6 and 220 pounds, the former Wisconsin-Platteville wideout is more of a big, kinda-slow receiver than a true, kinda-fast tight end. That worked in Arizona, where he averaged more than 9.8 yards per target and had six touchdown catches over 19 games despite playing only 35 percent of his team’s offensive snaps.
That’s pretty good usage for a team that’s rarely thrown to its tight ends. However, Kingsbury’s first Texas Tech squad is an example of how devastating an athletic blocker/target can be in his offense. The Red Raiders’ best season under Coach Kliff saw Jace Amaro explode from modestly-used role player to the team’s leading receiver in an 8-5 campaign that let Tech breach the AP top 10 (albeit briefly).
In that role, he split time between lining up in the slot and the offensive line buttressing Tech’s tackles. While wideouts like Eric Ward and Bradley Marquez stretched the field vertically, Amaro’s horizontal routes thrived in the space closer to the line of scrimmage. This took pressure off his teammates downfield while setting up easy-to-catch passes with massive potential for big runs after securing the ball. It also created mismatches when linebackers cheated closer to stop these drag routes, only to get burned up the seam for a first down (or more):
Having Amaro lifted Davis Webb, a future third-round pick and subsequent NFL washout, to his most efficient season as a quarterback. He was also the only above-average pass-catching tight end Kingsbury had as a college coach.
The Red Raiders had better offenses than the one Amaro starred in, but they also had significantly better wideouts and QB play (ahem, Patrick Mahomes) in most of those years. Kingsbury only had one more winning season in the five years that followed Amaro’s breakthrough. We’ve never gotten to see what his offense can do with high-level wideouts AND tight ends. The Cardinals could be in position to make that happen.
Landing a similar player in Arizona could create the safety valve Murray needs to level up the Cardinals’ passing game. Before the 2020 trade deadline, I argued for rescuing Evan Engram from New York due to his ability to turn short routes fired across the line of scrimmage into big gains. The Giants demurred because GM David Gettleman has entirely too much faith in his flawed players, but someone like that would be much-needed rain in Murray’s desert.
What tight end could reasonably upgrade the Cardinal offense in 2021?
This year’s free agent pool has some players who could fit the bill, but the team only has an estimated $11 million in cap space and has to make important decisions on re-signing guys like Peterson, Reddick, and Kenyan Drake. That means they’ll probably miss out on top-flight tight ends like Hunter Henry and Jonnu Smith (both of whom could wind up getting the franchise tag anyway). Rising young-ish players like Anthony Firkser and Robert Tonyan are unlikely to leave their teams as restricted free agents. There’s no perfect fit here for a TE-needy team.
They can bring Arnold back for a small investment. Since he’ll only be 26 years old, has limited NFL experience, and is coming off a career-best season, there’s a chance he continues to grow as a useful member of the Cardinals’ tight end platoon. He’d thrive as a TE2 behind a more complete player who can serve as an in-line blocker on running downs and stretch the field as a receiver.
There aren’t a ton of great candidates who fit that bill in Arizona’s price range. The team’s spot in the middle of this year’s draft will likely take them out of the running for top target Kyle Pitts. Pat Freiermuth from Penn State could be a second-round fit thanks to his red zone proficiency (16 touchdowns in 27 games), but he may be off the board before the Cardinals selection at No. 49 comes up. Instead, let’s look at the creamy middle of an underwhelming crop of free agents and find a guy capable of dialing up some big plays at a cheap salary.
Trey Burton played out 2020 on a one-year deal worth less than $1 million in Indianapolis. He’s always been more potential than production, but he was capable of a 54-catch, 569-yard season in 2018 that would have been franchise highs in Arizona in any single season since 2003. He combines Arnold’s 4.6s straight-line speed with a little more bulk (6’2, 240 lbs) and didn’t have a single blown block in 102 rushing snaps last fall.
Jared Cook will be 34, but has averaged 49 catches, 703 yards, and seven touchdowns per season as Derek Carr’s and Drew Brees’ safety valve. He had a down year as a blocker in 2019, but like Burton blew zero blocks in the 100+ run snaps last season. Jordan Reed restored some of his value in San Francisco, but remains an injury-prone enigma.
These aren’t great options, but others could be on the market soon. The shrinking salary cap means veterans like Jimmy Graham, Zach Ertz, Kyle Rudolph, Tyler Eifert, Cameron Brate, and David Njoku could all be cut this spring. Njoku would be especially intriguing because of his elite athleticism. The 5.3 yards-after-catch he’s averaged in Cleveland (about on par with Arnold’s 5.4 in Arizona) would give Kingsbury the Amaro-lite catch-and-run threat for which he’s been searching.
Buying low didn’t work out with former Baltimore second-round pick Maxx Williams, who only had 23 catches in two seasons with the Cardinals. Relying on a class of retreads will be a gamble as well, especially if players like Njoku or Rudolph see their prices rise due to the scarcity of proven tight ends.
Still, this is a gamble Kingsbury needs to take in order to unlock the full potential of his passing offense. A good tight end and his horizontal routes are the Game Genie that unlock all the cheat codes of his vertical passing game. A player like Arnold can fill that void in spurts, but in order to get the full Kingsbury Texas Tech Offense, the Cardinals need to swim upstream against nearly two decades of franchise history and find a tight end who can be their 2013 Jace Amaro. — CD
Mitchell Trubisky, the CBS of quarterbacks
Dak Prescott is, by far, the top quarterback who is set to be a free agent this offseason. But with the franchise tag window opening this week, it’s possible he won’t even hit the open market once the new league year begins next month.
That leaves a free agent quarterback class comprised mostly of veterans whose best years are probably behind them, like Ryan Fitzpatrick, Cam Newton, and Andy Dalton. It’ll also include Mitchell Trubisky, the former No. 2 pick who will always be compared unfavorably to the two generational quarterbacks drafted after him, Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson.
While it’s not Trubisky’s fault that the Bears traded up to select him four years ago, it’s clear to anyone who has followed the NFL recently that Trubisky has not panned out like GM Ryan Pace thought he would. Anyone, that is, except whoever runs the NFL on CBS social media account, which has been inexplicably riding the Trubisky train since at least the first week of the 2020 season:
Even when Trubisky was benched for Nick Foles:
Do they think we’re all idiots/blind?
Or are they just trolling?
Because quarterback wins don’t matter!
Based on my experience, I know that more than one person has access to the NFL on CBS handle and that running a social media brand account is much harder, both professionally and emotionally, than it looks. I also know that sometimes those accounts are intentionally reductive for the sake of engagement, which is both intellectually dishonest and insulting.
Whatever their motivation is for stanning Trubisky, I do not care for it and I would kindly request it ends as soon as he signs with a new team (if he does). But I’m not getting my hopes up, because Trubisky and CBS are quite the match.I mean, if any quarterback is most like a CBS show, it’s Trubisky, in that it bores me to watch and if you do enjoy it, I question your taste. — SH
Camy Cam loves the kids
I really do my best to avoid taking the bait in any generation wars because we all have our own baggage. I’m a millennial, a generation traumatized by school shootings and 9/11 as kids/teens, economic recession as young adults, and Trump and a pandemic as slightly older adults. (And yet, we’ve also been derisively labeled, a lazy person’s go-to insult regarding the frivolities of young people.) Recently, I’ve discovered that the TikTok youths have been mocking us about side parts, skinny jeans, and the laugh-cry emoji, but I can’t be bothered to care. Every generation likes to criticize older ones, and whatever follows Zoomers will eventually come for them too.
But I admit, when I saw this clout-chasing teen heckle Cam Newton (for being a free agent?!), my first instinct was to blame his age bracket:
That somehow, this kid disrespecting the former MVP represented his entire generation, a terminally online, brainwormed group that doesn’t know how to interact with anyone in the real world and thinks every type of communication needs to be memes and/or dunks.
I quickly realized that wasn’t fair, because it’s not exclusive to Gen Z:
It’s a problem we’re dealing with as a society, not just in the socially distanced, hyper-politicized era, but well before then too. After all, Fox News’ entire business model is based on attracting eyeballs for being the loudest and most obnoxious, all while dehumanizing others.
I think Newton handled the situation well, and much better than most would:
Throughout his career, Newton has had a strong connection with children and has gone out of his way to help them however he could. While the trash talker got most of the attention, I’m sure there were many other players at the 7-on-7 camp who were soaking up whatever advice Newton had for them. The same could be said for all the other camps Newton has held over the years, and all the other times he has tried to make a difference in young people’s lives.
Later, the kid apologized, and we should forgive him and move on:
In the end, I think he learned a lesson about common courtesy and the dangers of living as if social media were real life. It’s a lesson a lot of others, young and old, could use too. — SH
trabisky looks like someone from acorrding to jim hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahhahahahahahahahahahahaha