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Glory be!
Posted: July 20, 2006
From downtown Phoenix, you drive west about 18 miles before you start seeing a speck on the horizon. As you draw closer to Glendale, the speck becomes a stunning vision sitting amid the desert flatlands, dominating the landscape in a warm, welcoming fashion. This is the new stadium home of the Arizona Cardinals, a magnificent edifice shaped like a barrel cactus and representing everything the franchise hopes will be different and positive about a team that, for most of the last 18 years, has been wallowing in the armpit of the NFL.
On this late spring day, Michael Bidwill, son of owner Bill Bidwill and the Cardinals' vice president and general counsel, is acting as stadium tour guide. This is his baby; he has been intimately involved in its design and construction, which is appropriate considering he also has been instrumental in establishing a foundation to reshape everything else about the club.
Over the past decade, lots of stadiums have opened in lots of cities, each one hailed by ownership as symbolic of future plans and hopes for their team. For once, there is a facility that actually represents all of that. It's nothing you would expect from the Cardinals. It is special and innovative, with a retractable roof that will protect fans from 100-degree days in the fall and a retractable grass field, the first in the United States. Fans will be able to tailgate inside, close to the home locker room, or frolic on an 81⁄2-acre great lawn set aside for them outside the $455 million facility.
For sure, if ever a franchise needed a new home, it was the Cardinals, who contributed $150 million of the cost. After wasting all these years in Arizona, producing one winning season and two playoff games, having a mere 16 sellouts (10 against the Cowboys) and weighed down by the smallest season-ticket base (32,000) in the NFL, the team views the stadium as a new beginning, a huge step toward eliminating, among many things, the embarrassment of home games in which the bulk of the crowd almost always rooted for the opponent.
For sure, this bungling outfit, its reputation built more on its cheapness than its successes, seemed incapable of figuring out how to get this stadium built, much as it seemed incapable of figuring out how to compete in the NFL. Even as the league flourished, the team didn't. Wherever you looked, it did poorly, whether it was the draft or re-signing many of its best veterans or making the right coaching hires.
But Michael Bidwill's gradually increasing influence has slowly instilled much-needed direction and structure. And now, wow, look what's going on. The NFL awarded the now air-conditioned Cardinals their first season-opening game at home, against the 49ers, since they moved to Arizona from St. Louis in 1988. Fans showed some love by buying a record 58,000 season tickets before the team cut off sales, virtually assuring the Cards of all sellouts in the 63,400-seat stadium, another first in their Arizona tenure. That means no blackouts; the Cardinals haven't had a home game on local TV since 2000, save for a leaguewide blackout lifting after 9/11. Plus, they dipped into the draft and came away with a stunner, quarterback Matt Leinart. If all this weren't enough, they can toss the big enchilada at you: signing Edgerrin James, the premier free agent available this offseason. No wonder the players talk as if anything short of making the postseason would be a big disappointment.
You think Edge, he of four 1,500-plus-yard seasons with the Colts and still only 27, wants to be associated with an ongoing loser? If so, you fail to understand the power of his vision.
"Edge is not crazy, man," he says. "I have vision. Everyone was talking about what might happen to me in Indy and I already had seen what was going to take place--and it did. Now I have seen what will happen in Arizona, and it will happen. When it does, maybe I will finally get credit for my vision."
What James sees is this: an immediate winner. "When we start winning this year," he says, "you can expect it for years to come because everything is laid out just right. This is not what everyone else thought it to be. It is all perfect timing; it is just right for me to be here."
And he's really serious. He wants to wind up in the Hall of Fame and has already told his offensive line, in the kind of lighthearted manner that so ingratiates him with teammates, they have no option but to play well around him. "They don't need to f-- up my Hall of Fame," he says.
James' presence does bring immeasurable credibility to the Cardinals' image-building. You want to resist saying it puts them over the Edge, but virtually everyone in Cardinal land says it, so what the heck. That's why there's actually a buzz about the team. The rest of the league has taken note, too.
"Anytime you sign a player like Edgerrin James, it is huge," says Scot McCloughan, the 49ers' vice president of player personnel whose team plays the Cardinals twice yearly in the NFC West. "It grabs your attention. With him, they have four big-time playmakers on offense. Not many teams can match that. With those guys and the way that offense can score, you have to look at them as a playoff team."
The first time one of those playmakers, receiver Anquan Boldin, played in open-air Sun Devil Stadium, the Cards' former home, he thought it was a joke. At Florida State, he was accustomed to sellouts generated by enormously partisan fans. But for his pro home debut in 2003, just 23,127 fans showed up in the 73,000-seat stadium to watch as Arizona lost to Seattle.
"I was actually shocked," he says. "It looked like a scrimmage." All of what has plagued the Cardinals can't be blamed solely on poor fan support--you get into the chicken-or-egg argument--but this much is undeniable: The franchise had the worst home-field advantage in the league.
No wonder Boldin, who has caught 100-plus passes in two of his first three seasons, is so eager for September 10. "Selling out the stadium for us is a big thing," he says. "This gives us a chance to add on a lot more fans. I wasn't one of those guys who wanted to leave as soon as they could. I wanted to be part of changing this around, and that opening game represents a first step."
For Michael Bidwill, the opener represents something else: the end of what he calls "a failed 18-year experiment to play pro football in the Sonoran Desert in an open-air facility." Bidwill is not about to criticize management for the role it played in other failures of the franchise. After all, that would mean putting his family in a bad light, and that's not his nature. He is positive, enthusiastic and lacking the eccentricity of his father. For Michael, 41, a former federal prosecutor who joined the club in 1996, everything with the Cardinals now will be OK because they have the new stadium.
Translation: Blame mediocre Sun Devil Stadium for all of the club's past ills. Bidwill explains it this way: The Cardinals didn't have the revenue they needed to compete with their NFL brethren because at Sun Devil, they received no money from naming rights or parking and had limited income from signage and concessions, all of which they now control. Plus, they anticipate millions more in additional income from their new home's lofts (don't call them suites) and club seats. "The new stadium allows us to build a championship team because now we will have sufficient revenue streams," he says. "We have already demonstrated what it means to us. Once the stadium was greenlighted, we started extending the contracts of key players and brought in important free agents." No stadium, no Edge. That simple.
So, the stadium erases all the excuses. Gone. Now there is optimism the likes of which you've never heard from the Cardinal camp. But what is interesting is a parallel theme: Unprompted, the players and, indirectly, coach Dennis Green volunteer that the window will stay open for a year. If the team flops this season, the third of Green's reign (11-21 over two years), the tenuous fan support will diminish quickly.
"We have one year to make this happen," says defensive end Bertrand Berry, whose free-agent signing two years ago represented Green's first significant impact on personnel for the franchise. "We need to live up to expectations. We have the whole table set for us--the stadium, everyone is healthy, we have Edge, sellouts. We just have to do our part. But this team is hungry. We can make history. I want to be part of this, part of a new legacy here."
When Berry and others speak, you can hear Green talking. He has spent the offseason preaching opportunity to his players. He understands his first two seasons have been disappointing; he wasn't brought to Arizona to extend the losing. Certainly, he and personnel guru Rod Graves have stabilized the football operation, which is reflected in the success of recent drafts. But Green rejects any notion that this season represents a "honeymoon" situation for him. "My honeymoon here is over," he says.
Edge wants no part of any honeymoon, either. He says his intent in the offseason always was to become a Cardinal--as long as the team anted up the proper monetary enticement, which ultimately translated into $30 million spread over four years. Why Arizona? James understood the potential of Boldin and receiver mate Larry Fitzgerald, and from his Indy experience, he knew he wanted a team with at least two talented receivers. That's how you make the game as simple as it was with the Colts. "They have eight in the box, you throw," he says. "You have six or seven, you run me. I wasn't going anywhere unless they had two receivers the defense had to respect. If they didn't have Q and Fitz, I am not here, no matter the money."
Still, for the Cardinals to go after James so hard remains stunning. Green acknowledges, "We are known as a deliberate franchise in our decision making," a tactful way of saying, "We didn't like to spend money." But it now is a franchise with revenue to spend, and management suddenly is willing to use it.
Since his signing in March, James has worked to become part of the Cardinals' fiber. He studied tape of all 16 Arizona games from last year--every one of them. He figured out which plays worked and which ones didn't; he figured out who could play and who couldn't. He has suggested to his coaches which plays best suit him, and others have been added to take advantage of his abilities. He has preached to his mates on offense the value of the ball--"you never know when you will touch it again, so make the most of it every possession"--and started a fun-loving exchange with quarterback Kurt Warner about their vastly different taste (rap vs. Christian) in music.
He's very aware that Arizona finished last in rushing in 2005. The Cardinals hired former Vikings offensive coordinator Steve Loney to take over the offensive line, and they believe his coaching, the addition of guards Milford Brown (Texans) and USC rookie Deuce Lutui and good health of key veterans is enough to make Edge successful. The improvement of that line, coupled with how well the 35-year-old Warner holds up--he hasn't played 16 games since 2001--will have as much to say about Arizona's playoff aspirations as the addition of James.
Still, his presence already is creating a different feel within the team. He remembered watching the Cardinals in the final game of 2005, against the Colts. He thought their uniforms were tight but hated their white shoes. So he has talked Green into switching to black shoes for 2006. Now he is lobbying for "Victory Mondays." He wants the coach to give the team Monday off after a win. Edge used to irritate the Colts by spending most of the offseason at his Florida home; this offseason, he has made most of the training sessions in Arizona so he could immediately plant his mantra inside his teammates' minds: "If we don't make mental mistakes in games, I see no problem with us. We have the talent. But it is all about the smallest details." James knows detail. He talks frequently with Ray Lewis about how linebackers read running backs, then he figures out what to change and improve in his approach.
Can James really teach the Cardinals--the Cardinals!--enough detail to win? "You wait," he says. "They will be sending you back real soon to do another story on our success." Then he laughs the laugh of a confident man.
Senior writer Paul Attner covers the NFL for Sporting News. E-mail him at [email protected].
