Arizona Cardinals

The Cardinals spent time with a possible veteran addition to their offensive line on Tuesday.

Jeremy Fowler of ESPN reports that Jamaree Salyer visited with the team.

Salyer was a 2022 sixth-round pick of the Chargers and he moved on to the Dolphins as a free agent this offseason. Salyer went on injured reserve with a knee injury over the summer and Miami released him off of that list in August.

Per Fowler, Salyer had arthroscopic surgery on his knee and has been cleared to play.

Salyer made 31 starts for the Chargers over his first two seasons and saw time at both tackle and guard.

Lions head coach Dan Campbell credited the crowd for helping his team in Sunday’s win over the Cardinals, even though the Lions were on the road.

Campbell said Lions fans have showed out in each of the last two road games, but they were particularly loud in Arizona, when the Lions won 45-21.

“Our fans were outstanding. They traveled well — they traveled well to Carolina, we just didn’t give them anything to cheer about,” Campbell said. “They took over that stadium. You could hear them and by the end of it, that was good stuff. We hear them. We hear you. And we love it. We love it.”

Lions fans have traveled as well as anyone in the NFL in recent years, routinely making themselves heard in road games. That matters to Campbell.

The trade to send Marvin Harrison Jr. from the Cardinals to the Texans became official on Monday as the receiver passed his physical.

Head coach DeMeco Ryans told reporters in his Monday press conference that the team is excited to add the young wideout.

“He’s another really great playmaker,” Ryans said, via transcript from the team. “He’s crushed a lot of college records. Got multiple thousand-yard receiving seasons in college. All-American, always been a top receiver when he’s been on the field. He has good rapport with C.J. [Stroud] from their time at Ohio State. We’re excited to get him in, add another great player to our group.”

Ryans noted that he’s not worried about Harrison picking up a new scheme quickly to impact the club.

“The thing that I’ve heard from a lot of people speaking about Marvin is he’s one of the hardest workers,” Ryans said. “That’s the common theme that I’ve heard from multiple people, how hard of a worker he is. I’m not concerned about him picking up the offense and what he can be able to run for us, the things that he’ll be able to do for us offensively. I’m not concerned about it because the kid is a hard worker. He has a great attitude. He’s fired up to be here. When you approach it that way, as he will, he’ll fit right in.”

Plus, Harrison’s built-in chemistry with Stroud should speed up that process. Ryans noted the team solicited Stroud’s input on Harrison before executing the deal.

“I hope so,” Ryans said. “I think anytime you have players who have spent time together, whether it’s college or other teams, just having that prior relationship definitely helps when you come into a new situation.”

The No. 4 overall pick of the 2024 draft, Harrison’s production to this point of his career has not matched that draft status. After catching 62 passes for 885 yards with eight touchdowns as a rookie, he had 41 receptions for 608 yards with four touchdowns in 12 games last season.

He caught just five passes for 85 yards with a TD in four games this year before the trade.

The Cardinals are 2-15 with Jacoby Brissett as their quarterback in the past two seasons, with a point differential of minus-194. Brissett, though, will remain the starter for the foreseeable future.

“When it’s going good, it’s going good, and then it’s a three-and-out machine,” Cardinals coach Mike LaFleur told Arizona Sports. “There’s really nowhere in between right now for us. We got to figure out how to do all the good stuff better.”

Brissett has played all 351 snaps this season, staying in the game to the finish even in Sunday’s 45-21 blowout loss to the Lions. It would have seemed a perfect time to play Carson Beck, but the Cardinals have made the rookie quarterback inactive.

As such, Beck can play only if both Brissett and Gardner Minshew are injured.

The Raiders got rookie Fernando Mendoza some snaps the past two weeks, and LaFleur was asked whether the Cardinals might think about keeping Beck active on game day for that purpose.

“You can only have so many people up [on game day]. . . . It’s hard to put three quarterbacks up,” LaFleur said on Arizona Sports. “Right now, Gardner is our backup.”

During his media availability, LaFleur said the Caridnals will have conversations on Tuesday about whether to make the third-round pick active against the Rams.

“If we think that’s what is best, [then that’s what we’ll do],” LaFleur said, via Darren Urban of the team website.

Wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. passed his physical on Monday, according to multiple reports.

That makes his trade from Arizona to Houston official.

The Cardinals will receive a second-round and a seventh-round pick (originally belonging to the 49ers) in 2027 in exchange for Harrison and a 2027 sixth-round pick.

The Texans waived wide receiver Jared Wayne in a corresponding move.

Harrison, the fourth overall pick in the 2024 draft, reunites with his former Ohio State teammate, C.J. Stroud, in Houston. He finished his Cardinals career with 33 games played, 108 receptions, 1,578 yards and 13 touchdowns.

At the end of his news conference Sunday, Texans coach DeMeco Ryans confirmed his team acquired wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. in a trade with the Cardinals. The Cardinals announced the trade Monday.

The Cardinals will receive a second-round and a seventh-round pick (originally belonging to the 49ers) in 2027 in exchange for Harrison and a 2027 sixth-round pick.

The agreement is still pending Harrison passing a physical.

General Manager Monti Ossenfort addressed the trade in a statement.

“Decisions like this are never easy,” Ossenfort said. “Ultimately, we have to do what is best for our football team and that will always be the driving factor. We are extremely grateful to Marvin for what he has contributed to our organization and wish him the very best as he moves forward in his career.”

Harrison, the fourth overall pick in the 2024 draft, finished his Cardinals career with 33 games played, 108 receptions, 1,578 yards and 13 touchdowns.

The Cardinals lost their franchise-record ninth straight home game on Sunday, in blowout fashion to the Lions. After landing on the wrong side of a 45-21 final score, first-year coach Mike LaFleur was asked whether he’s considering a quarterback change.

“I’ve got way too many other things, you know, that I need to correct right now,” LaFleur told reporters. “Jacoby [Brissett] was not the problem. We were a problem as a team today. And, again, that starts with me.”

The Cardinals, after winning in Week 1 at the Chargers, have now lost four in a row. The Cardinals last won at home on September 14, 2025.

Next week, the face the Rams in L.A. Then, the Broncos comes to town. After that, the Cardinals visit the Cowboys. Then, the Cardinals go to Seattle. After that, the Rams visit. After that, the Cardinals play the Chiefs in Kansas City.

That 1-4 record could end up being 1-10 before the Commanders arrive in Week 12. With Arizona’s bye not coming until Week 14, the time could be coming for a flip from Brissett to rookie Carson Beck, if only to let the Cardinals evaluate whether they should ride with Beck in 2027 or target a quarterback with what could be a top-five pick in the 2027 draft.

On Sunday, the only No. 18 in Arizona was in the stands; receiver Marvin Harrison didn’t play — and presumably wasn’t even in the building — one day after the mysterious half-report emerged from Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport of ESPNFL that Harrison would be traded to a team to be named later.

It’s possible that they both knew the destination and agreed to not report it; as one source explained it to PFT, some of the #insiders (and possibly Schefter and/or Rapoport) knew Harrison had hired agents last month for the first time in his career but kept that news under wraps for as long as possible in order to ensure the effort to get Harrison traded would happen without a widespread sense of a potential Arizona fire sale emerging and, in turn, complicating the Cardinals’ effort to get value for Harrison and Harrison’s effort to get out of Arizona.

Fast forward to one of the most bizarre trade reports in recent years, if not ever, and the question is whether the two teams were still haggling as of Saturday or whether the deal was in place. And whether the door was open for another team (or more) to get involved.

Although the facts are very hard to completely uncover (the simple fact that Cardinals G.M. Monti Ossenfort and Texans G.M. Nick Caserio spent 14 years together, from 2006 through 2019, working for Lord of Secrecy Bill Belichick is the obvious reason for that), it appears that a deal was fully in place before Sunday, and that both teams wanted to delay the announcement until after they played their games on Sunday.

The Texans didn’t fully cooperate in that regard. At the end of his postgame press conference, Texans coach DeMeco Ryans (who was never a member of the Belichick hive) blurted it out after being asked about Harrison multiple times.

The Cardinals game, which kicked off at 4:25 p.m. ET, hadn’t ended. It hadn’t even started.

So why not announce it on Saturday? As best we can tell, the goal was to not create a distraction before Sunday’s game — more for the Texans than for the Cardinals, especially since the word was out that the Cardinals were trading Harrison out of town.

If the deal wasn’t already done, there was no reason for the Cardinals to not wait and see whether another team that had yet to play (up to and including the Monday night game between the Bills and Rams) would develop a sudden need for Harrison due to an injury and make a better offer for the fourth overall pick in the 2026 draft. But the Cardinals didn’t wait until the dust fully settled on Week 5. Which alone points to a conclusion that the deal was done before Sunday.

Then there’s the reality that Harrison must still pass a physical. While that’s usually a technicality, it’s a technicality that kept Maxx Crosby in Las Vegas after the deal was announced that would have sent him to Baltimore. Given that Harrison has been playing this season, there’s no specific reason to think he’ll fail the Texans’ physical. Still, it’s not completely done until the doctor(s) provide the official thumbs up.

As to the haggling, it was apparently done before Sunday’s games even started. But the fact that the information was partially reported served only to create confusion among those who consume the news, leading to the inevitable tinfoil-hat suspicions that someone was trying to make a little money in the prediction markets.

On the same day the Cardinals set the franchise record for consecutive home losses at nine, word has emerged of another lawsuit against the team and owner Michael Bidwill.

Via Theo Mackie of the Arizona Republic, former executive assistant Kendra Hogue and former assistant coach Don Shumpert filed a joint lawsuit in Arizona state court on May 26 against the Cardinals, Bidwill and COO Jeremy Walls. The lawsuit includes claims of racial discrimination, retaliation, defamation, and constructive termination.

The defendants removed the case to federal court on June 1. On September 19, federal judge John Hinderaker sent the case to arbitration, with the Commissioner selecting the arbitrator.

And so begins the latest fight over whether the league will be permitted to rely on contracts of adhesion that refer lawsuits against the teams to the secret, rigged, kangaroo court of arbitration. Although the tide has been sharply turning against the league’s efforts to stack the judicial deck in its favor with mandatory arbitration clauses that let the Commissioner control the process, different judges will bring different perspectives to such cases.

Hinderaker, for instance, was appointed to the bench by President Trump during his first term. That wouldn’t have happened if Hinderaker hadn’t been perceived as the kind of judge who will, in cases like this, align with pro-business interests.

Throughout the American legal community, federal judges who are appointed by Republican presidents are regarded as being pro-business, and federal judges who are appointed by Democratic presidents are regarded as having a pro-worker mindset. (Every time I make this observation, multiple non-lawyers bristle. That doesn’t make the assertion inaccurate. I practiced for 18 years; it’s a fundamental truth of civil practice in the United States.)

Arizona falls under the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which has a history of pro-worker rulings. This gives the plaintiffs in this case a better chance (eventually) at persuading a randomly-assigned three-judge panel to regard the NFL’s arbitration clause in the same way the Second Circuit did in the Brian Flores case.

The Cardinals are also a defendant in the Flores case, due to the firing of coach Steve Wilks after only one season.

The Flores case started the same way as this case is starting, with the federal judge choosing to enforce the NFL’s arbitration clause. More than four years later, most of the claims in the Flores case are on track to be resolved not by the league’s hand-picked arbitrator but in open court.

Word that the Cardinals were planning to trade wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. broke on Saturday morning and word that they had agreed to a deal with the Texans came just as the Cardinals were starting Sunday’s game against the Lions.

That game did not go well for Arizona. The Lions got out to a 31-7 lead on their way to a 45-21 win that led to questions for head coach Matt LaFleur about whether the Harrison situation was a distraction for the team.

LaFleur said he does not believe it was a distraction and that the Harrison situation was “not why we didn’t play well.” LaFleur declined to delve into things like whether Harrison wanted to be moved, how the Cardinals came to the decision to trade him or why Harrison failed to blossom in Arizona after being drafted fourth overall in 2024.

“I’m not gonna totally get into that right now,” LaFleur said, via Theo Mackie of AZCentral.com. “I really like Marvin Harrison. He’s a good person. I wish him well. We did what we thought was in the best interest of the Cardinals. Any guy that does not play to the level I feel like they’re capable of, I’m always gonna put that on me and coaching in general.”

The loss was the Cardinals’ fourth straight since beating the Chargers in Week 1, which tends to support LaFleur’s feeling that the problems plaguing the team go beyond any distractions that Harrison’s situation might have provided over the last couple of days.