Week 1 is in the book for the Arizona Cardinals and thankfully we escaped with a win. I have to give Cam Newton credit as I was not a believer of his and boy did he shut me up this weekend. This doesn't mean I'm all of a sudden going to anoint him the next great QB, but he was very good yesterday.
Cardinals offense
I was very excited to see Kolb perform well in his first regular season start as a Cardinal. He completed 66% of his passes which is 16 percentage points higher than our 3 QBs had last year. He also did a good job of spreading the ball around, having receptions by 8 different players. We converted on 41% of our third down conversion, when on average we converted only around 31% of our 3rd down conversions last year. Unfortunately, we again lost the time of possession battle by about five whole minutes. You have to take the time of possession battle in stride though, because the Cardinals touchdowns were relatively quick and we also had a punt return for a touchdown. Both our red zone efficiency and "Goal to go" efficiency were 33%(1/3), those are areas that we have to improve in. I was surprised we didn't see a single fade to Fitzgerald in the end zone but it seems as if we made a conscious effort not to force the ball to Fitzgerald. Beanie looked solid rushing 18 times for 90 yards and a Touchdown while also catching four passes out of the backfield(which is a nice surprise). The fumble was horrible and made this game more interesting than it had to be, a better team will punish us with those types of mistakes. Our O-line had its good plays and its bad plays, sometimes looking like beasts pushing the line of scrimmage, and other times getting blown out of the water. Thankfully Kolb is mobile enough to escape the pocket and get the ball down field or out of bounds. All in all, I was happy with what the offense did yesterday and hope they can continue to improve week to week and get that 3rd down conversion rate even higher and win the time of possession battle.
Defense
I'm really going to hope that this was just a case of having two inexperienced guys as our starting CBs. They looked DREADFUL at times, and only really bad other times. Steve Smith torched us with a double move again and also made an awesome grab(despite reasonable coverage) while scoring two touchdowns in the process. Maybe we were just so caught up with stopping the run, that we relied too much on our young CBs in the secondary, but we have to find a way to help them out or teams with much better receiving threats will torch us for more than 400 passing yards. We generated some nice pass rush getting to Cam Newton quite a few times, including an absolute garbage roughing the passer call on Richard Marshall. Going off on a tangent here, they have to find a way to give the defense some kind of leeway to get these QBs that are 6'5 250lbs to the ground. If Marshall(who is 5'11 198 lbs) were to go to Cam Newton's body and try to wrap him, up, he would just shrug off Marshall and make a play(as he did to Joey Porter). In order to get some of these mammoth QBs down, it is sometimes necessary to deliver a truck stick hit. Marshall didn't use his helmet, and didn't hit Newton's helmet. Yes he did launch into Newton's shoulder, but again there is no other way to get the guy down sometimes. Anyways back to our struggles on defense. Is it just me or should Schofield be a starter by now? I think he has more gas and more drive than Porter does at his age and it was evident to me yesterday. Despite not getting credit for ANYTHING, Schofield was in on at least two of those sacks and was just a second late from recording a solo sack. On the last play(the Porter offsides) I said to out loud,"Why the hell is Porter in there, it should be Schofield), and sure enough Porter had to jump offside to try to generate any pass rush. He also had a nice tackle on special teams. Daryl Washington left the game with an injury, I hope he's okay or we might be in serious trouble. Paris Lenon showed up again(is this guy underrated or what?) making some nice tackles including the game saving tackle with no time left. This defense has to improve by leaps and bounds for this team to stay competitive, unless we go Warner era and just try to outscore everybody.....which we won't.
Special Teams
Stephens-Howling is a special teams juggernaut and Patrick Peterson's punt return was downright hilarious. I've never seen a punt returner with absolute fear in his eyes as I did when I saw Peterson turn around and saw a Carolina player closing in on him.
Well that's all I have to say about this game. I'm glad we got a win but we have to improve in order to beat the better teams in this league.
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