Arizona Cardinals: Preseason loss to Raiders causing overreaction

The Arizona Cardinals were about as bad as a team could be in the NFL preseason as they lost to Oakland but the sky isn’t falling for Kyler Murray and co.

Leave it to the talking heads to go completely off the charts in the wake of a preseason game. The Arizona Cardinals were awful Thursday night in a bad 33-26 loss to the Raiders, to be sure. First-round pick Kyler Murray was abysmal in his second game of the exhibition season, going 3-of-8 for a whopping 12 yards.

He also had zero interceptions and zero touchdowns, zero energy and zero success. It was, by every metric, as bad as a No. 1 pick could play. As a reminder, it was also the second game of an exhibition season that will determine nothing. It is neither an indicator of how good or how bad the Cardinals will be in 2019. It also isn’t what ultimately will define Murray’s rookie campaign.

Already, the naysayers are unloading on Arizona head coach Kliff Kingsbury. Clearly, the media is pretty sure Kingsbury will go belly-up any game now and will be the single greatest detriment to the career of his rookie quarterback.

That may ultimately be the case, but saying so two games into the preseason is a rush to judgment showing an agenda that the coach is persona non grata in a league where change is met with both ridicule and skepticism.

This morning, the relic that is Rex Ryan showed why he’s on a set for ESPN’s Get Up! and not on an NFL sideline. His over the top criticism of the Cardinals offense is a further demonstration of why the NFL is often its own worst enemy when anything new interrupts the “old way”, via ArizonaSports.com:

"“It’s so boring watching all this stuff right there — I mean, c’mon, college football. I hope it gets smoked also, I really do.”"

Ryan twice fired from head coaching jobs in New York and in Buffalo, reminded fans why he is out of a game that has clearly passed him by. He continued on Get Up!:

"“I think it’s so boring. It is boring. We’re going to see. Kingsbury says, ‘Wait ’til Week 1.’ Oh, I can’t wait until Week 1. They’re going to get whipped Week 1.”"

It’s fair for the jury to be out on what Kingsbury, Murray, and the Cardinals are doing in Arizona. It very well may blow up before the 16-game, 17-week season wraps up on Dec. 29 in Los Angeles against the Rams. It also may not.

But to write the epitaph before getting to Week 1 of the regular season is not just premature, it’s the clown car that is punditry about the NFL, which is the kind of car best for blowhards like Ryan.