Arizona Cardinals lean on defense to beat St. Louis Rams

If you want to watch three hours of beauty, watching the Arizona Cardinals play football is certainly not for you.

Like they have done for most of this season, the Cardinals relied heavily on their great defense to eke out a 12-6 victory over the St. Louis Rams on Thursday night. The win pretty much guarantees a postseason spot, as long as the Dallas/Philadelphia game doesn’t end in a tie on Sunday night.

It was definitely a struggle at times for Arizona, especially on offense. They only managed a total of 274 yards of offense, but for the second straight game, the Cardinals run game was really good. The two-headed monster Kerwynn Williams and Stepfan Taylor combined to get 136 of the 143 yards on the ground against a stingy Rams run defense.

Arizona had a good night on special teams. The road team did a great job silencing a very dangerous special teams unit of the Rams, limiting Tavon Austin to -2 return yards. After a shaky couple weeks, Chandler Catanzaro came up big to connect on all four of his field goal attempts, which included drilling one from 51 yards.

Along with the great special teams play, the Red Birds once again got great play from their elite defense, limiting the Rams offense to only 280 yards. The Cards D got constant pressure on Shaun Hill all night long, sacking him twice and knocking him down on several other plays. They also held a red-hot Tre Mason to only 33 yards on the ground.

The game didn’t bring all good news for the Cardinals. Starting quarterback Drew Stanton went down in third quarter with a knee injury and wasn’t able to return. The severity of the injury is not yet known, but Stanton’s body language in the locker room reportedly didn’t look good.

We will find out in the coming days how serious the Stanton injury is. If it’s as bad as everyone believes it is, this team will have to fall back on their “Next Man In” philosophy yet again. It’s worked all season long, but is the possible season-ending injury to Stanton too much to ask this time around?

Stay tuned.