3 Biggest Offseason Questions Still Looming for the Arizona Cardinals
With all 32 NFL teams preparing for OTAs and mandatory minicamps, Athlon Sports is going under the hood to see what key questions remain for each team before training camps open in July. These questions might not get answered at minicamps, but any opportunity for new coaches to get familiar with their roster, rookies to get a feel for life in the NFL and free agents to get comfortable with a new team can be helpful.
The focus today is on theArizona Cardinals, who are in for yet another rebuild in a past decade that has done little to add to the organization's history in a positive sense.
Over the last decade, the Arizona Cardinals have enjoyed one winning season - 2021, when they went 11-6 and lost to the Los Angeles Rams in the wild-card round. Other than that, the franchise has been more about organizational churn and missed opportunities. Since Bruce Arians "retired" following the 2016 season (Arians, of course, later unretired and won a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers), there have been three head coaches (Steve Wilks, Kliff Kingsbury, and Jonathan Gannon), and 2026 sees the fourth - former Rams offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur.
This after a 2025 season in which the Cards bottomed out at 3-14 and finished 27th in DVOA (24th on offense, 21st on defense, and 30th in special teams). General manager Monti Ossenfort is in his fourth season at that position, and the rosters have been less than overwhelming. Which means that another season like that could lead to big changes.
Last season's collapses were about injuries to a degree, which Ossenfort brought up at the 2026 scouting combine.
"It's tough when you acquire players, and you try to build a team, and then those players that you're counting on, for whatever reason, they're not out there," he said. "There's two things that suck about life in the NFL. It's injuries and losing. And unfortunately, we suffered a lot of both last year. So we've gotta find a way to overcome that, we've gotta find a way to put our players in a better position to take care of them, to train them so that they can remain on the field.
"That has been a huge emphasis of what we've been doing and we're gonna continue to look at that as we go into the offseason and how we're going to structure practice, how we're going to train when the players come back in April." So that's been a huge emphasis for us.""
Here's the problem - there's no more grace period for a team that has to deal with an NFC West that also has the Los Angeles Rams, San Francisco 49ers, and Seattle Seahawks. So, how can these Cardinals fly high enough to at least give the impression of competitiveness? They must answer these three questions.
Who's going to be the quarterback?
The Cardinals did what everybody expected them to do in the 2026 preseason and cut ties with Kyler Murray, but where does that leave them at the game's most important position?
In 2025, veteran journeyman quarterback Jacoby Brissett had his best season to date in relief of Murray, who missed the last 12 games of the season with a foot injury. Brissett completed 3115 of 485 passes for 3,366 yards, 23 touchdowns, eight interceptions, and a passer rating of 94.1.
Not a bad return for a guy the Cardinals signed to a two-year, $12.5 million contract with $6.5 million guaranteed, and that's the point now. Brissett wants a bigger contract, which has caused some friction in the building, and that's placed LaFleur and his staff in the position of getting everybody else up to speed. Primarily, that's fellow veteran journeyman Gardner Minshew II, and third-round rookie Carson Beck. Whether Brissett is all-in for 2026 when the season begins or not, it's fair to say that there's no quarterback on this roster set to do more than he's given with the tools around him.
"I'm not really concerned about QB1 right now," LaFleur said on June 10 at the end of minicamp, in which Brissett did not participate. "I'm concerned about these guys reporting [to training camp]. Really, I'm concerned about them for the next 40 days and what they are doing - you can't take steps backwards, and that's not just the quarterbacks. That's all these guys."
It got lost in the shuffle, but Jacoby Brissett did have his best season to date in 2025. Anticipation throws, tight-window bombs, pocket movement, reading the field. He's not a Top 10 QB in the NFL or anything, but you can win with this. pic.twitter.com/0BlPYJIpQf
— Doug Farrar (@NFL_DougFarrar) June 11, 2026
Ideally, Brissett comes back fully on a compromise deal, and the franchise can reload in the 2027 draft with a more compelling quarterback class. Unless Beck turns out to be the answer, that's the next step in the evolution.
Can Mike LaFleur build the entire offense around Jeremiyah Love?
So, with all those quarterback issues, the Cardinals selected a running back with the third overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft.
What is this... 1973 all over again?
In the case of Notre Dame's Jeremiyah Love, there's more to the story. Love comes out of college as one of the most effectively versatile backs in recent memory. Last season for the Fighting Irish, he gained 1,372 yards, scored 18 touchdowns, forced 56 missed tackles, and had 23 runs of 15 or more yards on 199 carries, and he added 27 catches on 34 targets for 280 yards and three touchdowns.
Imagine a bigger Jahmyr Gibbs with peak Le'Veon Bell's route tree, and you have a basic idea of what Love can be.
"I've said this with running backs; they do come in all shapes and sizes," LaFleur said following the pick. "What's unique about him in my opinion is that in all three phases, and what I mean in all three phases, is the run game and the pass game and protection. He has the ability to mix it in all those, so you guys see all of the explosive stuff. That's all there, but he didn't have that weakness in my opinion in any of those phases, so you can put them in those situations. He has to learn this game; he has to learn the NFL. He has to learn the speed of it. There's a lot still that needs to be learned and practiced and all that, but he definitely has the tools to get there."
The metrics are great; the tape is even better. And the player is entirely ready for the next step.
"As a person, you ain't got to worry about me," Love told me shortly before he was drafted, when I asked him what his NFL team would be getting. "Off the field. I'm probably going to be in the house every day playing video games or whatever it may be. I don't really do too much. You can expect me to interact with the guy and be myself. Bring a good culture to the team. And if the culture's not right, we're going to build it right. We're going to build it the right way.
"As a football player, you're just going to get a complete weapon. I plan to take the next step in my game when I get to the NFL. I'm prepared to showcase everything. I want to be a great receiver, a great running back. I want to play special teams a little bit. So, I really want to do it all. So, you're going to get a weapon out of me offensively. And then, as a person, I'm down-to-earth, and ready to work and build good relationships."
Any advancement for the Cardinals will have come at the expense of the three other teams in the NFC West, which is shaping up to be quite the bloodbath in 2026 as it was in 2025. And any advancement will obviously have to come in part on defense, because between the 49ers, Rams, and Seahawks... well, those are three murderous offenses to deal with. Last season, the Cardinals went 0-6 in the division, and they were outscored 206-116 in those games.
The same Arizona defense that ranked 21st in DVOA last season has a few new names, but nobody major of obvious immediate impact. Veteran Josh Sweat led the team with 12 sacks and 47 total pressures; veteran Calais Campbell, who ranked second with six sacks and 33 pressures, is now with the Baltimore Ravens. Nobody else on the team had more than two sacks and 31 pressures.
The Cardinals signed Sweat to a four-year, $76.4 million contract with $38 million guaranteed before the 2025 season, and Sweat certainly earned it... when he was on the field. When he missed time due to ankle and knee injuries, the Cardinals' pass rush fell through the basement.
Unfortunately, the Cardinals did very little in the draft and free agency to mitigate these issues. Fourth-round pick Kaleb Proctor, who has the potential to be a dynamic force when healthy, suffered a torn meniscus in OTAs and will miss at least significant time, if not the entire season. The hope is obviously that DI Walter Nolen can make the most of his potential, which was limited in 2025 as the 16th overall pick missed serious time in his rookie season due to injury - including a torn meniscus of his own, which may delay his return until training camp.
"I think we have a lot of guys there that played a lot of ball," Ossenfort said of his edge group right after the draft came down. "Between Sweaty, Baron [Browning], Zaven [Collins], and BJ [Ojulari]. BJ had a tough year last year coming off the knee, and never really looked quite all the way back. Jordan Burch is going into his second year, so I think we have a group. It's a good mix of guys that are experienced, and have played a lot. We have to find a way to put them in the best positions. Obviously, always going to look to add and increase and raise the talent level, but it just didn't work out that way to add to that group over the last three days."
Other than that, defensive coordinator Nick Rallis has some players with potential, though they haven't quite emerged yet. One guy to watch is Will Johnson, the 2025 second-round cornerback from Michigan who had first-round tape, but concerns about knee issues dropped him. Johnson played through his rookie campaign with a number of minor dings, including a knee injury, but his 10 pass breakups showed what he can be as a press cornerback against the opponents' top receivers. Johnson also allowed four touchdowns last season, so the hay isn't in the barn quite yet.
And that's the challenge for Rallis and his staff - how to deal with three of the NFL's best offenses in their own division with a group with as many questions as answers. This may be what decides the Cardinals' fortunes in 2026... and possibly beyond.
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This story was originally published June 15, 2026 at 4:55 AM.