Few teams enter 2026 with as much to prove as the Arizona Cardinals. A new head coach, a rebuilt quarterback room, and one of the tougher schedules on paper make this a genuine transition year — here’s our team’s full breakdown of where things stand.
2025 Season Recap
Arizona’s 2025 season was rough in almost every way a season can be rough. The Cardinals opened 2-0, then lost 14 of their final 15 games, including a nine-game losing streak to close the year, and finished 3-14 — last in the NFC West and out of the playoffs for a fourth straight season. Three of those losses came on last-second field goals, and at one stretch Arizona became the first team in NFL history to blow three straight fourth-quarter leads of 7-plus points. Injuries piled on top of the losing, with Kyler Murray and James Conner both missing significant time.
It wasn’t without individual bright spots. Tight end Trey McBride set the NFL single-season receptions record for a tight end with 119 catches, and safety Budda Baker made the Pro Bowl. But a 15-36 record over three seasons cost head coach Jonathan Gannon his job in January, and it’s easy to see why — this was Arizona’s worst four-year stretch as a franchise.
Offseason Moves
The headline move was the coaching change: Arizona hired Mike LaFleur, previously the Rams’ offensive coordinator, as its new head coach — the franchise’s third coaching change in five seasons. At quarterback, Kyler Murray was released, opening the door for a full reset at the position.
That reset starts with veteran Jacoby Brissett, who’s projected as the Week 1 starter and provides the kind of steady, low-turnover game management a first-year coaching staff tends to value. Behind him, Gardner Minshew signed a one-year deal as a proven backup, while third-round pick Carson Beck (No. 65 overall, out of Miami) sits as the developmental option — the plan, for now, is for Beck to learn behind Brissett and Minshew rather than start as a rookie.
The bigger investment came at running back: with the No. 3 overall pick, Arizona took Notre Dame’s Jeremiyah Love, a home-run-hitting back scouts had rated as a legitimate top-five talent, pairing him with incumbent James Conner in the backfield. Elsewhere, the roster got sturdier up front with guard Isaac Seumalo (three years, $31.5 million) and added depth at receiver (Kendrick Bourne, Devin Duvernay) and across the defensive front seven. On the way out: safety Jalen Thompson, defensive tackle Dalvin Tomlinson, receiver Greg Dortch, and longtime defensive lineman Calais Campbell.
2026 Season Outlook
This is where the picture gets harder for Arizona. By most measures this is the third-toughest schedule in the league, and the way it’s front-loaded makes it worse: six of the Cardinals’ first nine games are on the road, against a slate that’s almost entirely projected 9.5-plus-win teams — all three NFC West rivals, plus the Chargers, Lions, and Broncos. Arizona also drew the latest possible bye, in Week 14, leaving a short runway to make any in-season adjustments once the stretch run arrives. And in a small but real signal of where oddsmakers and the league think this team stands right now, Arizona is one of only five teams with zero primetime games this season.
There is real relief on the back half, though. Six of the final eight games are at home, and a three-game stretch in Weeks 15-17 against the Jets, Saints, and Raiders looks genuinely winnable on paper. If this team is going to find its footing under a new coaching staff, that’s the stretch where it happens.
Our Team’s Projection
We’re projecting Arizona at 5-12 for 2026. That’s a rough season by any measure, but it’s built on real reasoning rather than just extending last year’s collapse: a brutal opening two months that could easily produce a 1-6 or 2-5 start, offset by a legitimately favorable closing stretch and a run game that now pairs a proven veteran with one of the more explosive rookie backs in this draft class.
The Cardinals’ season win total opened at 4.5 — tied for the lowest in the NFL alongside Miami. Our projection of 5-12 leans slightly toward the over, and the case for it is mostly about scheduling: a soft closing stretch gives a team that’s simply not as talent-poor as its 2025 record suggests a real chance to clear a very low bar even if the first half goes as badly as it looks on paper. The case against it carries real weight too — a rookie head coach adjusting to a new roster, a bridge quarterback situation that could get messy if Brissett’s holdout situation drags on, and a genuinely difficult first two months that could bury this team’s win total before the schedule ever eases up.
Win total bets like this one live and die on exactly this kind of schedule-shape reasoning — for more on how season win-total betting actually works, check out our Bet Smarter breakdown on the topic.