Cardinals’ season on life support after ugly loss to Seahawks

GLENDALE — Win, lose or draw against the Seattle Seahawks, the Arizona Cardinals knew they had four games left in the regular season after Sunday’s game.

But four quarters and an ugly 30-18 loss to the divisional foe later, and a promising 2024 looks just about wrapped up for Arizona.

Instead of giving Cardinals fans renewed divisional and playoff hopes after a brutal two-game losing streak, they got anything but watching Seattle beat Arizona at its own game.

The only real bright spot for Arizona was its opening-drive touchdown, where it looked like quarterback Kyler Murray and the offense had moved past their previous issues.

Spoiler: They did not.

And it starts with Murray.

The quarterback continues to throw it to the other team, adding two more interceptions to his 2024 resume. Seattle made the most of the turnovers, scoring a pair of touchdowns on the ensuing drives.

Murray’s now up to five picks across the past three games after throwing just three in 10 games played.

The signal caller did manage to toss a pair of touchdowns, but it’s the interceptions that stand out like sore thumbs on the stat sheet.

Arizona’s continued sloppiness didn’t help either.

Much like we’ve seen in recent weeks, the Cardinals continued to take one step forward and two steps back throughout the game behind six penalties for 49 yards.

It was an especially uncharacteristic showing from the normally consistent Paris Johnson Jr., who was flagged for holding three times throughout the afternoon.

Reality setting in for Cardinals

Losing both games to Seattle this year, Arizona’s divisional and playoff hopes are on life support. That 39% divisional chance Upshot’s playoff simulator on New York Times gave Arizona entering play, has now dwindled to 13%.

So much for having one of the easiest remaining strength of schedules.

Basically down 2.5 games to the Seahawks with four to play, Arizona now has to be near-perfect just to even have a chance at catching Seattle for the NFC West crown.

That’s without mentioning the Los Angeles Rams, too, a darkhorse candidate that very well could take the division from both Seattle and Arizona.

And for those of you wondering about an NFC Wild Card berth, that looks even more bleak.

As it stands Sunday, Arizona sits two games back for the final spot Wild Card spot behind the Washington Commanders. But much like Arizona’s situation with Seattle, that’s more like 2.5 games given Washington’s decisive head-to-head win in Week 4.

Ahead of the Commanders sit the Green Bay Packers (9-4) and Minnesota Vikings (11-2), two more teams that have head-to-head tiebreakers over the Cardinals in 2024.

The Cardinals’ most realistic path to the playoffs was getting back in the NFC-West driver seat with a win this week.

With that thinking now firmly in the rearview mirror, the Cardinals are seemingly headed down a one-way road toward the offseason.

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