Ken Whisenhunt has been realistic about his expectations for the Arizona Cardinals through the first two preseason games. So much so that he really just wanted to see his club run their systems without issue. Even with the expectations so low, the team has yet to live up to them.

“My expectations were that we were able to line up and execute a play,” Whisenhunt told reporters in Flagstaff Thursday. “In the last game we weren’t as sharp doing that. We have work to do. We still have a number of things we have to work on. We have to put some things in for this game that we want to say. I was pleased with the way our players worked.”

With Whisenhunt admitting there is still a lot more to do, you know they worked hard in their final week in Flagstaff. Just don’t expect all their issues to be fixed by the time the team’s first home preseason game on Saturday rolls around.

“You’ve got to be careful about how much emphasis you put on what’s going to happen in this game,” the head coach said. “We want to play well and we want to win, there’s no question about that, but you have to realize too that we’re going to do things in this game that we’ve never done in live action before. If we can do better from a penalty standpoint, from a mistake standpoint, then we’ve gotten better as a team.”

It may sound frustrating to hear a coach say not to put much emphasis on what you see happen on the field, but it’s all a byproduct of having an extremely truncated offseason. Thanks to the NFL lockout many of the Cardinals’ new faces have only been on the practice field for a little under a month. Many of those guys are in key roles, too, with the most prominent of being quarterback Kevin Kolb.

Fans may want Whisenhunt’s team to look in midseason form when they take the field for the at University of Phoenix Stadium, but the reality is it may take weeks — if not months — for this team to be completely comfortable and adjusted to their new systems an schemes.

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