Can Carson Palmer Get The Cardinals To The Promise Land?
By Omar Soussi
The Cardinals were considered a Super Bowl contender in the middle of the season last year before Carson Palmer, their starting quarterback, tore his ACL against the Rams in November.
After Palmer went down, the team after that couldn’t do much of anything offensively and the Cardinals were knocked out of the playoffs by the Panthers in the Wild Card round. Now healthy, fans and expects alike anticipate the Cardinals to make a deep playoff run but how reasonable is it to bank on a quarterback who hasn’t won a playoff game in his 11-year career?
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I personally think that Palmer is a good quarterback. He’s at least knocking at the door for top 10 in the league but I’m not sure if I want to put all my faith in him to lead the Cardinals to the Super Bowl.
Now, I’ll bank on the team getting to the playoffs because talent wise, there aren’t five teams I can see better than the Cardinals in the NFC (Packers and Seahawks are the only two teams that are clear-cut better than the Cardinals). I have a lot of faith in head coach Bruce Arians and the surrounding cast as well that the Cardinals have.
When it comes to the regular season, Palmer looks great for the most part. He threw only three picks this year with 11 touchdowns in six games last season, but in the playoffs he has looked atrocious.
In Palmer’s first appearance in the playoffs, he got injured right away so you can swipe that game away on his record.
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In his second game, he took a Bengals team that looked very good in a lot of big games that year and lost to a Jets team that was solid defensively but still beatable. Palmer threw for only 146 yards, one touchdown, one pick and completed only 50 percent of his passes. Those are his only two times he has led a team to the playoffs.
Now, the sample size is a bit small, but what I’ve taken from this is Palmer has played bad in big games and is not exactly a quarterback I want to put my faith into. He’s 35 and just recovered from another ACL tear, he may not even be able to finish this season.
Throughout this article, I said why I don’t want to put my faith in Palmer but with the team that he is surrounded by and who his coach is, I’ll put my faith in the team. Palmer is on a team that is run by possibly the second best coach in the NFL with a roster that’s arguably top five in the league.
Palmer has never been on a team like this and if the Cardinals grab either an elite pass rusher, and a running back like Melvin Gordon or Todd Gurley in the draft, they could be even better.
I could see the Cardinals make the playoffs and go far if the team plays football sort of like the Seahawks; strong run game, strong defense and a quarterback who isn’t asked to do a lot but steps when he has to.
The Cards can make a deep playoff run if they don’t demand too much from Palmer. If they can play effective football and not put everything on Palmer, they can easily make it to the divisional round or even the NFC Championship game next year.