ARIZONA CARDINALS

Cardinals have tough decisions to make with final cuts

Aug 31, 2016, 5:13 PM | Updated: Sep 1, 2016, 11:22 am

Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians, left, and general manager Steve Keim watch practice at t...

Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians, left, and general manager Steve Keim watch practice at the NFL football team's training camp, Friday, July 29, 2016, in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Matt York)

(AP Photo/Matt York)

Arizona currently has 75 players on their roster, and by Saturday afternoon that number must be trimmed to 53.

Head coach Bruce Arians said by now they have a pretty good idea of which players will stick, noting there are about four open spots left with 12 players vying for the jobs.

Veterans with track records, young players with upside: all are on the chopping block, though some of the less-experienced players could land on the team’s practice squad.

So, how do you choose?

“It depends where that veteran is on the clock,” Arians said. “Is the arrow still going up or is it level? And a young player, probably the deciding factor will be special teams.”

While we cannot really know for sure which players on the bubble, it is safe to say the most difficult positions to trim down will be along the defensive line and at receiver.

One of the veterans up front, Red Bryant, knows his place on the roster is anything but secure.

“They already got great defensive linemen, great leadership, and I’m just grateful that they thought enough of me to bring me back and getting an opportunity,” he said following the team’s preseason loss to the Texans. “As a football player, that’s all you can ask for, an opportunity. If I’m here, I’m going to be ecstatic. If I’m not, I’m still going to be rooting for them because that’s how good of a group it is here.”

A veteran of eight NFL seasons who was out of football until the Cardinals signed him last November, Bryant has a unique perspective on the situation he is currently in.

Players who have either not been in this situation before or have been in it for the majority of their young careers, are not likely as calm.

Arians has noticed a change in his players now that the final cuts are near.

“Yeah, they go fast in a walk-through, and that’s OK,” he said. “There’s a lot of anxiety in some of these young guys.”

No doubt some of the names that end up on the list, which will probably be released in part Friday and finalized Saturday, will come as a surprise, at least on the surface. In fairness, a sign of a team being good is that they can afford to (or have to) move on from talented players.

The hope, of course, is that none of the decisions come back to bite the team, such as a player who they dumped landing a key role with a rival or someone they keep under-performs relative to someone they did not.

Steve Keim has to weigh many factors when choosing who will still be a Cardinal by the end of this weekend. Keim has never one to shy away from making a tough roster move as long as it will improve the team, as in his first three seasons in charge the GM made 592 roster moves, 182 of which came in 2015.

Though the heavy lifting of building this year’s Cardinals will be finished by Saturday afternoon, the work is never really done.

“I think thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that, when you’re building your roster, that those players that you’re going to have inactive on a week-to-week basis are either guys that are dealing with injuries or guys who are developmental-type prospects,” Keim said. “You don’t want to look over and see that guys making significant amount of money.

“So you want to make sure that you’re building your roster in a healthy way, but at the same time, I think that we’ve done a good job of eliminating dead money as a whole, in the cap, and putting guys in position to succeed. This round is going to be difficult, because starting where we did four years ago, it’s night and day in terms of, now all of a sudden, instead of scouring the waiver wire — we’ll continue to do that — but it’s going to be more difficult to find guys that we think can improve our football team.”

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