SI.com: Arizona Cardinals played in two of the worst games of 2014 NFL season
Feb 5, 2015, 10:16 PM | Updated: 10:16 pm
Including playoffs, the Arizona Cardinals played in 17 games that counted last season.
Some of them, like their victories over the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys, were entertaining. Some of them, unfortunately, were not.
The folks over at Sports Illustrated compiled a list of the five worst games if the season, and two Cardinals games made the list.
And if you can ignore the fact that the writers were a little short on, well, facts, then you’ll probably think they’re not too far off in their assessment.
So, which games made the list?
First was Arizona’s 27-16 loss to the Carolina Panthers in the Wild Card round of the postseason, in which SI claimed Ryan Lindley threw his first career touchdown pass when he actually had thrown two the previous week against San Francisco.
We can look back now and hold up the Super Bowl, the NFC Championship Game and a handful of other moments as the NFL’s gold standard for postseason drama, but the opening game of wild-card weekend did all it could to ensure the 2014 playoffs had nowhere to go but up. The battered and undermanned Cardinals capitalized on two gift-wrapped Panthers’ turnovers to take an improbable 14-13 lead at halftime, but as so often happens, 20 yards of second-half offense were not enough to put the game away. A final botched hook-and-ladder play landed Arizona in the record books with 78 total yards of offense, the lowest mark in playoff history.
You probably will not find any Cardinals fan who does not think that game was terrible — especially because Arizona lost — but even then, it was not exactly a display of football excellence by either team.
Of course, the other game on the list was Arizona’s Week 15 road win over the St. Louis Rams, a 12-6 victory that ended up clinching a playoff spot for the Cardinals. SI got the score of this game wrong (they wrote 12-3), but still, it’s hard to look at field goal fest with any kind of excitement unless you are a fan of defense or kickers.
Kickers Greg Zuerlein and Chandler Catanzaro put all the points on the board, and the two punters combined to log over 700 yards in this snoozefest on Thursday Night Football.
An ugly win? Players and coaches will tell you there is no such thing, and after this game Cardinals coach Bruce Arians talked about how proud he was of his team for how it played that night. But still, that does not mean the game was easy on the eyes.
