Which is worse? Cardinals’ lack of explosives or pile of penalties?

TEMPE — Arizona Cardinals head coach Mike LaFleur isn’t trying to be middle of the pack offensively.

If that’s the goal, there’s going to be someone new sitting in his seat in the very near future.

He was brought to town to flip the script on that side of the football, and while there have been glimpses three weeks in, Arizona sits 23rd in total offense. The passing game is middle of the road, while the run game lags even further behind.

What are the hang-ups?

Looking at the three-game sample size, two problem areas stand out more than anything else:

– Lack of explosives
– Mountain of penalties

But which one is the bigger issue? What is holding the team back more?

The Cardinals have been far from clean

LaFleur set the tone early on this offseason when it came to a clean operation.

His message was simple: Under his command, Arizona was going to have one of the cleanest operations in the league.

Three weeks in, however, the Cardinals offense has been anything but clean. Arizona is currently the ninth-most penalized team in the league with 24 flags. It’s second in penalty yards with 245.

That’s not as bad as his brother Matt LaFleur’s Green Bay Packers, who have been flagged more than any other team and are giving up a league-leading 276 yards. It’s still nowhere near where Mike LaFleur wants to be.

Penalties are going to happen, but it’s the pre-snap issues — false starts, illegal motions — that are really grinding LaFleur’s gears.

“You want to limit it, and you want to educate, and you want to talk about it, but you also don’t want to limit their play style,” LaFleur said Wednesday. “That’s not on the 11 players. That’s on all of us, and it starts with me providing the right clarity and confidence that it’s just second nature for them. Like we have to mix up our cadence. We have to.

“It’s a huge advantage to what you do offensively because it’s the only real advantage you have. You know when you’re snapping it. They don’t. The easy answer is, ‘Well just go on the same cadence every time.’ Well, we’re not trying to be middle of the pack. That’s just not what we’re trying to do. You’re going to have someone new sitting up here. We’re going to be hard on ourselves. We’re not going to be hard-headed, but we’re going to have a standard in which we operate.”

Of Arizona’s biggest issues three weeks in, penalties are the most controllable.

That also makes them the most frustrating, especially when they are directly impacting wins and losses. Just look at Arizona’s start to Sunday’s loss in Santa Clara and the mountain of first-half penalties (eight for 65 yards) the team had.

LaFleur is right that coaches need to put their players in the best positions to succeed. Once they cross those white lines, though, it’s on the athletes to do their jobs.

“We should have won (the 49ers game). Just too many penalties, too many self-inflicted wounds, the list goes on,” tight end Trey McBride said. “Just comes down to operation. We got to play better as an offense. We got to get lined up. We got to do the little things, the small details. That is what’s kind of holding us back right now.”

“It’s frustrating for sure because I feel like Mike has kind of harped on it all season about having a good operation,” Marvin Harrison Jr. added. “Players have not done a good enough job to make that come to life and obviously we’re going to continue to work on it. Just takes all 11 of us to do that.”

When it comes to the Cardinals not having a clean operation (penalties, miscues, etc.) early on, Marvin Harrison Jr. says the players haven’t “made that come to life.”

“It takes all 11 of us to do that.” pic.twitter.com/Di5r8DV0Xa

— Tyler Drake (@Tdrake4sports) October 1, 2026

Not packing a punch

The self-inflicted issues are especially frustrating, especially when the Cardinals haven’t been able to move the ball down the field nearly as much as they need to from a chunk yardage standpoint.

Through three weeks, the Cardinals are dead last in explosive play rate (3.1%), whether it be through the air (1.7%) or on the ground (5.3%).

Dead last.

That’s about the last thing I expected to see out of a LaFleur-led offense even with the quarterback and offensive line questions and Harrison’s up-and-down career to this point.

There are just too many playmakers on the roster for the offense not to be more dynamic. Yet the Cardinals got through nearly an entire game without an explosive play.

Sure, it was against arguably the best defense in the league, but if Arizona hopes to one day hang with the NFC West juggernaut, it’s got to find that other gear.

And while pushing the ball downfield with deep shots to Harrison would help remedy some of the issues, that can’t be the entire solution.

Just look at the 49ers last week. They didn’t need a bomb to open up the scoring on Sunday. They turned a two-yard pass to Mike Evans into an 80-yard touchdown. Hook-and-ladder or not, the players created something when given the opportunity.

Even with the right play call, it’s on them to make something happen. Rookie running back Jeremiyah Love not having a carry of at least 10 yards can’t be a weekly thing. He and others have to create.

And wouldn’t you know it, having a cleaner operation can help with all that!

“We got to limit some of the penalties and get ourselves out of second-and-longs and first-and-longs,” Harrison said. “I think explosives can kind of come from those just naturally when you’re not putting yourself in bad situations to begin with.”

If they can do that, McBride believes the explosive plays will come in bunches.

When it comes to debating which is worse for the Cardinals, it’s awfully close between the lack of explosives and pile of penalties.

The pre-snap penalties are much easier to fix. The only team involved there is the Cardinals.

Explosive plays, meanwhile, not only involve the Cardinals but the defense they’re playing against, too.

Penalties might be the more frustrating issue within the walls of the Tempe training facility. The only people in their way, however, are themselves.

You can’t say that about explosives, with the defense having a say in it all.

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