Why Your Team Sucks 2012: Arizona Cardinals

Some people are fans of the Arizona Cardinals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Arizona Cardinals. This 2012 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read the other Why Your Team Sucks 2012 previews here.

1. Kevin Kolb is a coach's son! One of my absolute favorite stock Peter King storylines is the myth of the coach's son; that growing up with your old man as your QB coach somehow makes you light years more mentally prepared to play quarterback than some poor schlub who had to get by with normal coaching and a non-asshole father. Back in 2010, King fawned over Cardinals quarterback Kevin Kolb...

He looked like the coach's son that he is, like he'd been prepping for this day for a couple of decades, not a couple of years.

Kolb then told King he likes to practice throwing off-balance, which makes all the sense in the world because Kevin Kolb ALWAYS throws off-balance. I'm not sure he's aware that his feet extend beyond his heels. Anyway, anytime a sportswriter tries to tell you that a player is special just because his Daddy was a coach, AVOID THAT PLAYER AT ALL COSTS. If anything, that kid got an unfair head start in life because Coach Daddy plugged him in the starting lineup with little to no justification. Also, that kid is probably a raging dick. Kevin Kolb's completion percentage declines the more he plays, and his yearly completion percentage has dropped every year for the past three years. If there's any justice, he'll lose his job to the immortal John Skelton in training camp and the Cardinals will bumblefuck their way to 9-7 thanks to the fact that...

2. Patrick Peterson is the offense. It's never a good sign when you're relying on your punt returner to score two touchdowns every game because your passing offense is such dog shit. Patrick Peterson returned four punts for TDs last season, which is fantastic for a punt returner but horrific if that also happens to double as your total offensive output. Since the Cardinals were unable to lure Peyton Manning to Arizona (I assume Manning didn't want to relocate to Arizona because he didn't want to get shot), it's gonna be another shitty year of hoping that the Cardinals can squeeze out just enough points against just the right amount of terrible opponents to eke out a winning record. Should be fun, like trying to watch a man free his head from a wrought-iron fence.


3. All the quarterbacks are gonna die. The Cardinals gave up 54 sacks last season, second worst in the league behind the Rams. Christ, what the hell is wrong with the NFC West? Don't any of these teams value guard play? Anyway, the line is still puke. So even if you Cardinals fans (all three and a half of you, since I only count Leitch as half a fan) find yourselves overjoyed once Skelton wins the job early in the season, please know that Kolb WILL play at some point. And so will Ryan Lindley. And so will Richard Bartel. OF TARLETON STATE! That's an actual school. I'd never heard of that school until six minutes ago. Sounds like a fictional rival school on Coach. Anyway, by the end of the season, the Cardinals will be staggering to the finish line with a mute hobo under center, running Beanie Wells 40 times a game into a fucking brick wall while Larry Fitzgerald chokes Ken Whisenhunt to death on the sideline. I'm glad Kurt Warner's brain isn't alive to see this.

4. Did we mention that Arizona is a fucking horrible place? Nothing delights me more than Arizona people trying desperately to keep people OUT of Arizona. You don't want me to go to your oven-hot bus station of a state? OH NO! WHAT EVER WILL I DO NOW?! I'll guess I'll have to find some other place to stare at old Midwesterners waiting to die and be shot at by deranged sheriffs who believe Justified is a documentary. O WOE IS ME!

I jumped out of an airplane in Arizona once. Given that you lose ten degrees every 1,000 feet you climb into the air, I can tell you that the only comfortable place in Arizona is roughly 4,000 feet above its surface. On the ground, it's an amusement park for the mentally ill.

5. Hear it from Leitch. We had absolutely no Cardinals fans write in for this preview because there are no Cardinals fans. There are only people who go to the stadium for the air conditioning. All we have is Will Leitch, who hates football and only pretends to cheer for an NFL team so that he doesn't look like the 90-year-old man we all know he secretly is. Here is what he says:

They're really amped about having won seven of eight down the stretch: They think that's the team's true level, and that the first half was an aberration. I think Whisenhunt is a terrific coach with a major blind spot: He thinks the QB position is just like any other, and competition will somehow produce a gem of a starter just because it worked with Warner. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt—he got the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl, which is something so insane I sort of think I dreamed it—but fact is: Both those QBs suck, and the sad thing is that might be all that matters.
