Cardinals need Mike LaFleur to be their franchise head coach

Three times in the past 19 seasons, Arizona has hosted a Super Bowl at State Farm Stadium in Glendale.

Just once, can we stage the first game of the NFL season and not the last? The game that almost always belongs to the reigning champions?

Our chances feel slim. We again feel like sad outcasts in a league of mostly cool kids. The Cardinals have been around for 106 years, and their winning percentage (.419) is second worst in NFL history. Only the Buccaneers are worse, and yet Tampa Bay fans have enjoyed two Super Bowl parades.

Even more dispiriting: In the past 25 years, the Cardinals rank 26th in the NFL in winning percentage (.427). That includes the Super Bowl run, a new stadium and a lot of promises from Michael Bidwill. It’s unacceptable that a team with such a low bar only improves eight-thousandths of a point (.008) in a quarter century of trying.

Yet we remember what it felt like on that sobby Sunday in 2009 when a stadium full of diehards openly wept at the conclusion of the NFC Championship game. How we were fueled by the breathtaking bombast of Bruce Arians, when the Cardinals became a national treasure. We remember when our stadium was once a problem and not a speed bump.

Our potential is there. We are not a bad football town. We are a town suffering from bad football. Which makes their failures even more maddening.

On the doorstep of a new season, my hope is that the Cardinals have struck gold with Mike LaFleur. The organization badly needs stability and competence at the top. They need to break the cycle of underwhelming hirings and predictable firings. They need LaFleur to become a star in his profession, thus gaining the leverage, status and power he needs to fill in all the soft (cheap) spots within.

Once upon a time, Arians had it rolling. He put the Cardinals on national television and billboards in Times Square. He also put players in their places, always transparent and always candid. There was a time when Bidwill loved him. And then things got a little loose.

LaFleur is only 39. That’s 21 years younger than Arians when he took the job in Arizona. With LaFleur’s energy, personality and discipline, he could be a mainstay in Arizona for over a decade.

There are small victories waiting. If LaFleur truly excels at designing offense and calling plays, the 2026 Cardinals should be wildly entertaining and capable of staging heroic upsets. They have an armory of skill players and one of the most underappreciated players in football (Jacoby Brissett). That will buy him favor and time.

But the Cardinals need even more. They need LaFleur to be the next big thing, more than ready for one of the hardest jobs in football, following in the footsteps of Suns head coach Jordan Ott. Because the numbers say the Cardinals need more than just a franchise quarterback.

They need a franchise head coach.

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