I guess. Bad players just trying to hang on to their NFL jobs. NFL teams rarely rarely rarely tank. It's much more common for front offices to create a kind of benign neglect and you end up with the 2018 Cardinals who suck only kinda on purpose.
It's relatively easy to field a six- or seven-win NFL team. It takes some work or a lot of bad luck to field a two-win NFL team.
For what it's worth I don't think anyone in the building has used the word tank.
But what do you want them to do when your starting QB is badly injured? We all already said we know the Cards aren't going to do anything next season. At best if we threw everything into next year and Kyler came back by game 6 we would have a 10% chance of making the playoffs. And they haven't shot our load trying to compete next year we don;t have the resources to compete in 2024 either.
This is called Steve Keim syndrome.
So knowing they cannot compete next year they are trying to conserve the limited resources at their disposal and gain additional resources via trades and comp picks to compete in 2024. I expect they will either restructure Kyler to bring more money forward into this year or try to conserve as much cap as possible to roll over into 2024.
This is all very obvious stuff if anyone took any time to think about it.
At the same time, I don't think they are actively tanking or they would not have brought in Kyzir White. They could have played Zeke Turner and Kamu Grugier-Hill in that spot.
They are going to try bring in some solid vets with upside on reasonable contracts to start to lay a foundation for 2024. White, Hernandez and Froholdt are all 2 year deals. And now more than ever I expect them to trade back in the draft (although trade partners are dwindling) and pick up more picks.
This team was never competing next year so why blow our wad on gaining a couple more pointless wins?
