Arizona Cardinals

Jacoby Brissett has not attended any of the Cardinals’ voluntary offseason program as he waits for a reworked contract for this season.

Josh Weinfuss of ESPN reports that Brissett and the Cardinals are “significantly” far apart in negotiations.

The quarterback is entering the second year of a two-year deal he signed in March 2025. He is scheduled to make $4.88 million in 2026, with a max value of $5.39 million, but only $1.5 million is guaranteed. Gardner Minshew, who was signed as a free agent in March, has $5.14 million guaranteed for this season.

Earlier this offseason, Weinfuss reported that the Cardinals informed Brissett he was their starting quarterback. But the Cardinals have a new head coach and a new offense, and it’s unclear to what extent Brissett’s absence will hurt him in the competition for the starting job.

Cardinals coach Mike LaFleur downplayed Brissett’s absence earlier this week, saying that Brissett has “done probably everything we’ve ever done schematically.”

Arizona will hold a mandatory minicamp on June 8-10, which will cost Brissett a fine of $107,911 if he misses all three days.

Brissett started 12 games for the Cardinals last season, completing 64.9 percent of his passes for 3,366 yards with 23 touchdowns and eight interceptions. The Cardinals went 1-11 in his starts.

Michael Wilson caught 85 passes for 1,113 yards and seven touchdowns over his first two seasons. The Cardinals wide receiver had 78 receptions for 1,006 yards and seven touchdowns last season.

It’s how he got there that makes becoming one of only 19 pass catches with 1,000 yards even more impressive.

Through the first five games, Wilson had eight catches for 52 yards and a touchdown. Jacoby Brissett replaced Kyler Murray in Week 6, and Marvin Harrison Jr. and Zay Jones went out with injuries in Week 11.

Wilson’s 593 routes for the season were the third-most in the NFL.

“If myself from February could have went back to myself in October and said, like, ‘Hey, man, you’re going to have a thousand,’” Wilson said, via Josh Weinfuss of ESPN, “I probably would have been like, ‘Jesus Christ. I don’t know what would have happened for me to get a thousand, but some pretty cool stuff would have had to happen.’

“And, so, yeah, I’m still proud of myself for that.”

Wilson is eligible for a contract extension, but he said it’s business as usual.

“I don’t want that to affect how I show up every single day because ultimately that stuff is going to take care of itself,” Wilson said. “What I did last year, I can’t change. Like, that’s my resume, that’s what we’re going off of.

“But as soon as Week 1 starts and we’re playing against [the] L.A. Chargers, contract stuff, that stuff doesn’t matter. What I did last year doesn’t matter. I need to make sure I’m taking care of what I can now, tomorrow, the next day after that. That’s going to help me sort of replicate that season and build upon that.”

Will Johnson won a national title and made All-America teams while wearing No. 2 at Michigan, but it wasn’t available when he joined the Cardinals as a second-round pick in 2025.

Johnson wore No. 0 as a rookie, but he’s back in his old number for his second season because linebacker Mack Wilson opted to switch to No. 1. After the team’s first OTA on Monday, Johnson said the switch made a significant difference in his mind.

“It means a lot,” Johnson said, via the team’s website. “It just feels right. I feel real comfortable in it so I’m glad I was able to get that back.”

Johnson was available in the second round because of injuries that kept him off the field too often in his final college season and a hamstring injury hampered his preparations for his rookie season, but better health is another reason why Johnson feels he’s on an upswing this time around.

“It’s a whole different feeling going into this year versus last year,” Johnson said. “Last year, coming in with all the draft stuff and combine, and I was injured coming in, so that versus having some experience and feeling comfortable in the defense is a whole different feeling. It feels really good this year.”

The Cardinals opted for defensive continuity by retaining defensive coordinator Nick Rallis under new head coach Mike LaFleur. A strong year for Johnson would help make that decision pay off in Arizona.

Cardinals head coach Mike LaFleur didn’t have much to add about where things stand with quarterback Jacoby Brissett at a Monday press conference.

Brissett skipped the first two phases of the team’s voluntary work this spring as he looks for an adjustment to his contract and he remained away as they began organized team activities on Monday. LaFleur downplayed the impact of Brissett’s absence earlier this month by noting that the veteran has “played a lot of football” and would be able to pick up what the team is doing.

LaFleur did the same on Monday by saying that Brissett has “done probably everything we’ve ever done schematically.” He said everything else is status quo from where it was the last time he discussed Brissett’s absence.

“It’s the same as where we were a few weeks ago. . . . We’ve had contact, I’ll leave it at that,” LaFleur said.

LaFleur said he would be more concerned with a younger player missing time. Third-round pick Carson Beck would fall into that category, but he is seeing plenty of action along with Gardner Minshew while Brissett is away from the team.

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.

It’s one thing to know generally that a team will be facing a tough slate of opponents in the upcoming season. It’s another thing to see the schedule laid out, one game after another.

For the Cardinals, 2026 was always destined to be a long year. They play three of the best teams in the entire league, twice each, thank to membership in the NFC West. The Cardinals play all teams from the AFC West. They play all teams from the NFC East. And that fourth-place schedule includes the Lions (somehow) and the Saints, who began to surge late in the 2025 season.

Now that the schedule is out, it’s looking even worse for the Cardinals. Via DraftKings, they’re the underdogs in every game. In eight of the games, Arizona is on the wrong end of a double-digit spread.

The objectively winnable games are few and far between. There’s a cluster of them after a very late Week 14 bye. By then, the Cardinals may be in full-blown tank mode.

Here’s the full schedule, with the current spreads:

Week 1: at Chargers (-11.5).

Week 2: Seahawks (-10).

Week 3: at 49ers (-11.5).

Week 4: at Giants (-7).

Week 5: Lions (-8.5).

Week 6: at Rams (-13.5).

Week 7: Broncos (-7.5).

Week 8: at Cowboys (-10.5).

Week 9: at Seahawks (-13.5).

Week 10: Rams (-10.5).

Week 11: at Chiefs (-11.5).

Week 12: Commanders (-4.5).

Week 13: Eagles (-8.5).

Week 14: bye

Week 15: Jets (-1.5).

Week 16: at Saints (-5.5).

Week 17: Raiders (-1.5).

Week 18: 49ers (-8.5).