With loss to Panthers, Cardinals come up short of ultimate goal

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The idea that the Arizona Cardinals’ season could end Sunday night in Charlotte was an understood possibility leading into the game.

It essentially became a certainty after just 15 minutes of football.

The Cardinals won the coin toss but did little right after that, going three-and-out on their first drive and falling behind 17-0 after one quarter.

For a team that won 13 regular season games and then a thriller last week in the Divisional Round, falling short of the Super Bowl is a tough pill to swallow. For that same team to lose 49-15 and be barely competitive in the process, well, that’s something no one expected.

“I never saw this coming myself, a game like this,” head coach Bruce Arians said. “I thought there was a big five-minute swing in this game when were down 17-7, and we go three-and-out and then we fumble a punt and then we intercept the pass and get down, and have a chance to get it right back and we throw it away.”

The Cardinals turned the ball over seven times. Carson Palmer was picked off four times and lost two fumbles, while Patrick Peterson muffed a punt that, as Arians alluded to, prevented the team from seizing momentum and getting back into the game.

But really, while the mistakes were many, the truth is for 60 minutes the Cardinals were outplayed and outclassed.

“The thing is, a loss is a loss — one point would have probably hurt just as bad,” defensive lineman Calais Campbell said. “But this does hurt because we got embarrassed today.”

Campbell added that as a team captain, responsibility for what transpired falls onto his shoulders. He’s not alone, though, and Arians summed it up by saying the team’s “best players especially didn’t play well enough.”

He’s not wrong, though no doubt the Panthers had something to do with that. But still, there were times in the first half where it seemed like the Cardinals might have been able to claw their way back into the game, yet were undone by turnovers and other untimely mistakes.

Carolina is now 17-1 and heading to the Super Bowl for a reason, and it was on full display Sunday night. Meanwhile, while the Cardinals came close to reaching the sport’s pinnacle, with the way this game went, it feels like they’ve never been further away.

And for all the team accomplished — a franchise record for wins, points and touchdowns, among other things — this sub-standard performance will be a difficult one to get past.

“It stings, it stings,” receiver Larry Fitzgerald said. “You work really hard to get to this position and to come up short in this fashion, it really hurts.”

Had the Cardinals been competitive and come up just short, no doubt the feeling wouldn’t differ all that much. At the same time, to come up with your worst performance of the season in the campaign’s biggest game adds a different level of frustration.

“You come in with a ton of confidence and you’re excited about this moment and this game,” Palmer said. “They jumped out early and got on top of us. We dug ourselves in a hole and just never came close to coming out of it.”

Did the Cardinals get beat by a better team? Yes, but the same answer applies when you ask if the Cardinals are better than they showed in the NFC Championship. No team can expect to win when it turns the ball over seven times, and the final score was very much indicative of how the game went.

It just wasn’t indicative of how good this Cardinals team is and was. The Super Bowl was a very real aspiration and now, any championship dreams will have to wait until next season.

“Mentally you are coming in here just five hours ago with hopes and aspirations of being able to play for a Super Bowl and represent your city and your state at the mecca of all sporting events, and five hours later you are on a bus back home and your season comes abruptly to a halt,” Fitzgerald said.

No one in the locker room was in any mood to reminisce, with the pain of defeat so fresh in their minds. All of what they have accomplished pales in comparison to what they were unable to.

“We kind of had, since OTAs and training camp, it was Super Bowl, championships, or bust,” linebacker Kevin Minter said. “And we busted.

“Forget the record, forget the records we did break on both sides of the ball; if you don’t get that ring at the end of the day, none of it matters. You see it in everybody’s eyes, nobody cares about that record, no one cares. It was all about that ring and we didn’t get it.”

The reasons for why the Cardinals fell short are many. Sometimes you leave a football game wondering how the final score what it was, but there will be no such issues for the Cardinals in this one. Great season or not, a loss in this setting is trumped only by a similar result in the Super Bowl, at least in terms of devastation. And because they fell short — especially in this manner — they leave with an empty feeling that will be difficult to shake.

“If you’re not putting a ring on your finger, if that confetti’s not falling on your head, it’s a bad year,” Arians said. “Now you’ve got to look back and there were a lot of positive things.

“To win 14 games, to win a playoff game, to be here in the Championship Game, those are all positive things, but we’re not about that. We’re about winning the championship and we didn’t play near well enough, especially our best players, for us to win the game.”

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