Only one team in the NFL is able to win the Super Bowl each season, but every franchise deserves a grade. How did your team do this season?
Every team in the NFL claims its only goal each year is to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. Obviously, that’s an exaggeration for quite a few franchises. Most teams in the league can achieve success without winning the Super Bowl.
In this piece, we’ll assign a grade to each of the league’s 32 teams. In most cases, we’ll base our grade on their preseason expectations. A team that was expected to finish last in their division but made the Playoffs would get high marks. In contrast, a team projected to win their division who only managed to scrape into the postseason with a Wild Card berth might receive an ugly grade.
We will start our piece with a team that didn’t enjoy a good season in the desert.
Arizona Cardinals-F
It’s hard to give the Cardinals any credit for their 3-13 campaign. Any time you fire a coach after just one season it’s pretty obvious things have gone poorly. That’s precisely what happened to Steve Wilks in Arizona.
The franchise went into their 2018 campaign with the foolish hope that Sam Bradford might be able to lead them to the playoffs. That dream lasted a grand total of three regular season games. The Cardinals deserve some modicum of credit for going ahead and handing the starting job over to Josh Rosen early in the season.
The result with Rosen at the helm of the offense were predictably ugly. He threw 14 interceptions against just 11 touchdowns and perhaps more concerning, he only completed just over 55 percent of his passes. He’ll need to improve in every area of his game during his sophomore campaign.
The Cardinals didn’t enter the season with any legitimate expectations, but they were simply dreadful. There’s a reason Arizona’s decision makers elected to hit the reset button as soon as the season was over.