Kingsbury, Cardinals' Preseason Preparation Under Fire
When it rains, it pours.
Just hours before the Valley was hit with a massive rainstorm, the Arizona Cardinals were overwhelmed with their flurry of passes and blitzes alike from the Kansas City Chiefs.
The game felt out of reach after Patrick Mahomes guided the Chiefs to two consecutive (and seamless) scoring drives to open play. A missed opportunity on fourth down to draw the game within one score right before halftime was perhaps the last time fans felt as if Arizona had any real shot of winning.
Now, the Cardinals get back to the drawing board with a blemish already on their record.
The Las Vegas Raiders await in six days, and while the Cardinals will already be quick at work to prepare for Week 2, many fans are still left wondering where in the world all that preparation went for the opening week of play.
Not many of the starters played a healthy amount of snaps (if any at all) in the preseason, which includes quarterback Kyler Murray.
Murray finished his day by going 22-of-34 for 193 yards passing and two touchdowns to no interceptions. The two scores came in the second half when significantly trailing Kansas City, but they count all the same in the box score.
Simply put, the Cardinals didn't look very meshed. It didn't help Kansas City appeared in midseason form right out of the gates.
Head coach Kliff Kingsbury took the podium after the loss and was asked what the first issue that will be addressed. He quickly pointed to practice:
When it came to answering for his handling of the preseason, Kingsbury got oddly defensive rather quickly.
Receiver Marquise Brown, who made his regular season debut with Arizona, managed to reel in four catches on Sunday but didn't quite look on the same page at times with Murray.
Brown told reporters in the locker room that he's not using the preseason as an excuse for poor play.
"I mean, bottom line is you got to execute. Whether we had time, we could've still came out and not execute. We've got to execute. We all NFL players, so we got to go back to the drawing board and get it done," said Brown, who did however agree with Kingsbury on practice.
"We definitely could practice a lot harder. We definitely could practice a lot sharper and treat each route like a game route."
Injuries aside, when you look like that in the first game of the year, at home, something isn't quite right in the air.
Was Kansas City ever losing that game? The Chiefs looked like a bulldozer ready to trample anything in its way, and perhaps no amount of preparation would have stopped that.
Yet it wasn't exactly what Kansas City did, but rather what Arizona didn't do as a result.
The Cardinals didn't look prepared. Kingsbury admitted after the game they were simply out-played and out-coached.
It's only Week 1, but the pressure is now on moving forward. Preparation now must coincide with adjustments to get the Cardinals back on track.
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