Cardinals quarterback Jacoby Brissett missed the early phases of the team’s offseason program and nothing changed with Monday’s move into the organized team activity phase of their work.
Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports that Brissett did not attend the team’s first OTA on Monday. The third phase of the offseason program features the most on-field work and the quarterbacking portion will be handled by Gardner Minshew and third-round pick Carson Beck.
The OTAs are voluntary and next month’s minicamp will be the only mandatory work of the offseason. Brissett will be subject to fines if he does not attend those workouts.
Brissett started the final 12 games of the season for the Cardinals in 2025 and is looking for a bump in pay that reflects the possibility that he’ll be the starting quarterback again this season. Cardinals head coach Mike LaFleur said earlier this month that the team has had good dialogue with Brissett, but didn’t share any of the details of how that dialogue might lead to Brissett’s appearance on the practice field.
Given the increased work for the others in his absence, the current approach could ultimately work against Brissett’s bid to land the starting role.
Cardinals linebacker Mack Wilson was injured in a Week 9 game against the Cowboys. The team placed him on injured reserve with a rib injury a week later, and he didn’t play again last season.
Wilson said Saturday that his injury was far worse.
“I was in a dark place for sure,” Wilson said, via Darren Urban of the team website. “Rib fracture, punctured lung, was in the hospital for three days, tube in my chest. It was tough for me, coming out of the hospital, having to sleep sitting [expletive] upright for three weeks.”
Wilson, 28, earned captain honors and became the playcaller on defense last season. That lasted only eight games as the injury cost him the final nine games of the season.
Wilson had missed only seven games in his first six seasons.
“It was a learning experience, a humbling experience,” Wilson said of his injury last season. “But I took a backseat, and I was able to reevaluate my career and my life in general. Remember why I do it. I have some hunger in me and feel this year is going to be one of the best years of my career.”
In a sea of team-produced schedule-release video (some of which have morphed into way-too-long short films), there are two ways to stand out. One, be really good. Two, be really bad.
As to the latter, the Cardinals are the 2026 champions.
Via Yanyan Li of Front Office Sports, the Cardinals’ offering was relentlessly mocked as “AI slop.” Because, frankly, it is. Watch for yourself. (And then peruse the replies.)
Li notes that the Arizona effort apparently prompted multiple other teams to emphasize that they did not use AI in the creation of their schedule-release videos.
Regarding the substance of the Cardinals’ video, the mascot-driven effort didn’t resonate for most. The vast majority of the jokes simply didn’t land.
There’s no requirement for teams to make a schedule-release video. And it’s also not mandatory that the effort be aimed at going viral in a good way. For every team that chooses to try, there’s a risk it will go viral in a bad way.
Which the Cardinals have learned, the hard way.
Former NFL defensive end Josh Mauro died last month at 35. Via the California Post, authorities have determined that Mauro’s death occurred as a result of an accidental drug overdose.
Officially, the cause of death was “acute combined fentanyl, cocaine, and ethanol intoxication.”
Mauro, who played college football at Stanford from 2010 through 2013, went undrafted in 2014. After four years with the Cardinals, Mauro spent one with the Giants and one with the Raiders. He returned to Arizona for the final two season of his career, in 2020 and 2021.
He appeared in 80 career regular-season games, with 40 starts.
Though they drafted quarterback Fernando Mendoza at No. 1 overall in April, the Raiders are one of five teams without a scheduled primetime game in 2026.
That’s not something new from the NFL, as the Titans didn’t have a primetime game in 2025 either after selecting quarterback Cam Ward with the first overall pick.
While the Raiders are a storied team with a nationally recognized brand, the fact that the team has won just seven games over the last two seasons is surely factoring into how attractive — or, in this case, unattractive — the club is for games in a standalone window.
In a conference call on Friday, NFL VP of broadcasting planning Mike North was asked whether or not the uncertainty of Mendoza being Las Vegas’ starting quarterback factored into the decision to keep the Raiders out of a primetime slot.
“As far as the Raiders go, I mean, nobody knows if or when Mendoza might play,” North said, via Ryan McFadden of ESPN. “It would certainly be great if we knew. We don’t. But they went out and signed a very competent veteran quarterback, and if they find themselves, you know, hovering around .500 and playoff-relevant in the middle of the season, they might be a little more reluctant to pull the trigger and move to the rookie. And if they are playoff-relevant, they will find themselves flexed into bigger national television windows, whether it’s Sunday night, Monday night, or just a bigger footprint on a Sunday afternoon.
“Not to point fingers, but I think the best comp is probably Tennessee from last year. They drafted No. 1 overall, took a quarterback who looks like he can play in this league, [and] they didn’t happen to get a national television appearance last year, either. … We don’t draft our way into primetime. We play our way into primetime.”
While head coach Klint Kubiak and the rest of the Raiders’ brass have said that they’d prefer to have a veteran start over a rookie quarterback early, Mendoza could be in the starting lineup sooner than later over veteran Kirk Cousins. We’ll see how Las Vegas’ quarterback situation plays out and whether or not the club can play its way into a flexed primetime spot as the season unfolds.
