Chase Edmonds: Cardinals’ Kliff Kingsbury has chip on his shoulder

If you’ve ever watched an Arizona Cardinals press conference with Kliff Kingsbury, you may notice something about the way the head coach answers questions.

He tends to be reserved. He plays his cards close to his chest. He doesn’t get overly animated or show a lot of emotion. He doesn’t respond with much to critics or naysayers, of which there have been many.

But ask running back Chase Edmonds, as NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport did on the RapSheet and Friends podcast this week, and he sees the first-year head coach as having a chip on his shoulder.

“I’m a big-time Kliff fan,” Edmonds said just days after having the biggest performance of his career.

“I remember reading a quote about Kliff maybe like a week ago, where he said something to the point where like, ‘A lot of people just when I got hired just forgot that I coached football’ … Kind of just took the notion that he didn’t know how to call plays all because of whatever his record was at Texas Tech. And to me man, he just has a chip on his shoulder to come into this league and light it on fire.”

Kingsbury went 35-40 as the head coach of Texas Tech and was fired this past offseason. He was slated to become the offensive coordinator at USC before the Cardinals came calling, going to an offensive-minded coach in a copycat NFL of teams perceived to be trying to find the next Sean McVay. For that reason, some were skeptical about the actual merits of the Kingsbury hire.

“He doesn’t care what the doubters say, he doesn’t care what the outside noise says,” Edmonds continued. “And that’s our message every single day in this office, in this facility. And I love Kliff just because I think he’s been doing a great job of just adapting to every game we’ve had.”

Around the same time Edmonds interviewed with Rapoport, an exchange of stories was given through 98.7 FM Arizona’s Sports Station’s programming in which NFL analyst Mark Schlereth said the Cardinals offensive line was unhappy with the play-calling at the beginning of the year, and that a pass-heavy offense was making things difficult on the line.

Offensive lineman D.J. Humphries refuted that claim to Burns & Gambo, but Schlereth maintained his claim in a follow-up interview. Either way, whether it was making anyone unhappy or not, the play-calling has changed since the beginning of the season.

The Cardinals have passed fewer times per game as the season has gone from week to week, and Arizona is playing less 10-personnel (one back, no tight ends and four receivers on the field).

“We started off playing 10-personnel the first two or three weeks like 70% of the time,” Edmonds said. “And I just looked at the formations from last game, and we were in 12-personnel for most of the game, really. Kliff, he does whatever it takes to win a football game, and he does whatever it takes to keep us in a football game.”

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