Cardinals can’t waste Larry Fitzgerald’s prime

If you owned a classic Ferrari that was “choice”, you wouldn’t drive it backwards off a cliff (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off taught us that).

If you had a brain that would make Stephen Hawking jealous and instantly make you a Mensa member, you wouldn’t work as a janitor at Harvard, you’d go to school there (Good Will Hunting taught us that).

And if you had an all-time great at wide receiver like Larry Fitzgerald, you wouldn’t have Kevin Kolb or John Skelton throwing to him (the 2012 NFL Preseason has taught us that).

Let’s be honest, entering training camp every Cards’ fan, your humble Phoenix Fan X included, had high hopes that one of the two quarterbacks would emerge as a realistic option to lead the team back to the playoffs. Like every year prior, we drank the Cardinal Red Kool-Aid and believed this was the year it all turned around. If things don’t change in terms of signal callers, that dream will turn into a nightmare faster than you can click your heels and say, ‘there’s no place like home.’

The biggest travesty in life and relationships is wasting someone’s prime. Like Lyle Lovett being married to Julia Roberts, having Kolb or Skelton throwing to Fitz is wasting almost two years of one of the hottest things going. At almost 29, the wideout from Pitt has been one of the fastest players to reach several milestones. He’s the youngest player to reach 950 receptions, he has the fourth-most touchdowns for a receiver under 29 years of age and he’s already the all-time franchise leader in receptions. Do you really take the best years of a player like that’s athletic prowess and flush it down the toilet like the family goldfish who passed away?

The simple answer is no. The complex answer is, as Will Smith would say, ‘awww hell naw.’

That leaves Ken Whisenhunt and crew in quite the conundrum. Do you roll the dice that either Kolb or Skelton finally plug into the Matrix and prove they’re the chosen one (highly unlikely) or find another QB in the two weeks remaining before they take the field for real against the Seahawks. I’ll take what’s behind curtain No. 2, please.

It’s not ideal, but nothing in this situation is. With quarterbacks like Colt McCoy, Matt Moore and (gulp) Tarvaris Jackson out there to be had for a song, it’s time to find Mr. Right Now rather than Mr. Right. No longer can the Cardinals be in search of the future, they just have to find someone that can handle the present. It’s becoming painfully obvious — almost as painful as Chris Berman doing play-by-play — that neither Kolb nor Skelton are ready to be that and may never be.

For years Cardinals fans have believed that things would work out regardless what the situation looked like. If things don’t change before the start of the season, those fans may finally learn a lesson no movie could ever teach you. The lesson that, unless you have a top flight quarterback, you’re just going to waste your players’ talent and your fans’ time.

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