Without Palmer, Arizona Cardinals expected to lean on Adrian Peterson

TEMPE, Ariz. – Feed the beast or continue to put more wood on the fire. Either metaphor works, and offensive coordinator Harold Goodwin used both to describe Adrian Peterson when it comes to the Arizona Cardinals’ rushing attack.

Given the loss of quarterback Carson Palmer, a lot more is going to be expected from the Cardinals’ ground game moving forward, beginning this week in San Francisco.

“If you go back to Tampa Bay, we just fed the beast. It’s like an old stove, the more wood you put in it, the hotter it gets. So, we just got to make sure we feed him the ball so he can get comfortable,” Goodwin said, referring to Peterson.

“It’s just something we got to do. We got to hand it off. Hopefully, with the change at quarterback, hopefully we can lean on it a little bit more. For me, the more we hand it off, the better I feel because that means the quarterback is not under a whole lot of pressure and not getting hit, so we just got to do a great job and make sure we’re blocking.”

The Cardinals rushed for a season-best 160 yards against the Buccaneers and then followed that up with a season-low 25-yard effort in London. The difference? That’s obvious. The Cardinals played with a lead in Week 6, while they fell behind early to the Rams thus forcing head coach Bruce Arians to call more pass plays.

Afterwards, Arians admitted to abandoning the run game too soon. At the same time, however, when the Cardinals haven’t had early success in games running the football, Arians has been hesitant to turn to the run game.

“We just got to produce in the first (quarter). I don’t want to give him the opportunity to get away from it,” left tackle D.J. Humphries said Thursday. “We know how it gets when we get away from it. We be out there, backyard football in the 7-on-7, if we don’t so we just got to make sure we ground-and-pound it and we’ll be able to keep that thing rolling.”

For Peterson, trying to convince Arians to stick to the run game starts well before gameday. It starts in practice.

“I got out, and the guys up front do a great job, and I bust my butt where I’m trying to take every play three or four yards down the field,” he said, “and give some good looks so when they go back and watch film, they know that this is going to be consistent on every play.”

Ever since he entered the NFL in 2007, Peterson has spent much of his 11-year career as the centerpiece of his team’s offense. With the Cardinals, he was already looked upon as a large piece to the puzzle, trying to fill the shoes of David Johnson. And now, with Palmer joining Johnson on the sidelines, Peterson should be even more involved in the gameplan.

“I’m all about that. Feed the beast. I’m all about that for sure,” he said, smiling. “I feel like I’m kind of back to myself. I put in the work to be able to come out and be in this position (as the focal point of the offense), so for me, it’s kind of like back to the old routine.”

In his debut with the Cardinals, Peterson carried the ball 26 times for 134 yards. But against the Rams, he was handed the ball only 11 times for 21 yards.

And regardless of who is carrying the football, the Cardinals’ rushing attack continues to rank dead last in the NFL. They may be able to improve upon their 63.4 yards per game average when they play the 49ers, who have had trouble stopping the run this season, giving up almost 132 yards a game.

The goal with running the football is to take some pressure off Drew Stanton, according to Goodwin.

“I like the offense. As long as we’re executing we’re going to score points,” he said. “When we’re not executing, we’re not going to score any points so we got to do a better job of execution because our offense has been good the over last four years so why change it? Yeah, we’ll tweak things here and there but it’s all about execution at the end of the day.”

And it’s not just Goodwin who would prefer the Cardinals run the ball more. The offensive line favors run blocking to pass protection.

“Just watching the guy be all hyped in the first quarter and then watching the look on his face in the fourth quarter when he knows the same play that’s been ran 50 times is about to happen again and he know that he can’t do anything about it. That’s probably the most fun,” Humphries said, “knowing that I’m about to whup your (expletive), you know you’re about to get your (expletive) whupped and you got to take it.

“And we got some guys on this team that can run it, top to bottom. That’s exciting. I definitely think we need to keep throwing some sticks on that fire to keep that thing blazing.”

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