This is an entirely false narrative.
During the 10-2 start to 2021, the Cardinals averaged 31:26 TOP, with over 30 minutes in 9 of the 12 games, over 33 minutes in 6/12, over 35 minutes in 3/12, and over 40 minutes at Seattle!
Even during the awful 1-4 slump to end the season, the Cardinals averaged 30:49 TOP, with the advantage in 3 of the 5 games.
For the entire 2021 regular season, the Cardinals averaged 31:15 TOP. They were ranked 18th in passing attempts and 7th in rushing attempts.
Even during the abominable 2022 season, the Cardinals averaged 30:15 TOP - 30:56 in the 10 games Murray started, and 29:17 in the remaining 7. They had the TOP advantage in 10/17 games.
Yes, statistically your numbers are 100% correct. But, when you delve deeper, there were reasons why our TOP appeared to be a positive. In 2021, we had the 4th most penalties in the NFL. And the brunt of those penalties seemed to be pre-snap & holding calls on our offense. In our opener, when we dominated TOP against TN, we had like 4-5 penalties on the opening drive. But, Murray kept extending those drives anyways with big 1st down plays. What those penalties did was to force our offense into longer, more time consuming scoring drives. And our offense managed to somehow make up for those penalties during the 10-2 start. On top of that, in that 10-2 start, our D created 23 turnovers, which also put the ball into the hands of our offense and built up our TOP advantages in the 10-2 run.
After the 10-2 start, the D only created 4 turnovers the rest of the way, and instead of having short fields after a turnover, our offense couldn’t seem to create full field possessions. So bottom line, yes, you are correct. It wasn’t necessarily TOP that doomed us. It was more that a relatively weak D completely stopped creating turnovers & we averaged 8 penalties per game in the stretch when we lost 5 of our last 6 games.
My point with a Petzing based offense, is that our TOP will be based on significantly fewer penalties, and a more physically punishing run & pass game. If we can do that, we won’t need our D to create an inordinate amount of turnovers in order to win games.