The Cardinals refused to include footage of players getting cut during the All or Nothing series. But they didn’t exclude from the show discussion of the reasons why a given player was cut.
As everyone digests the eight-episodes-at-once dump from Amazon and NFL Films of the team’s 2015 season, people are noticing that one player was fired ostensibly for parking his car in the wrong spot.
Early in the series, coach Bruce Arians provides a profane reminder to players not to park in his spot. Later in the series, when discussing the decision to dump former track-and-field performer Lawrence Okoye from the practice squad, it’s pointed out that he put his car in a place where he shouldn’t have put his car.
Then again, Arians’ message to players was that if they parked in the wrong spot he would “tow your ass,” not that he would “cut your ass.” Okoye’s ass got cut.
It makes for interesting non-TV TV and it helps fill up this specific page during a slow week in the NFL, but it’s surely not the main reason the Cardinals cut him, or anything close to it. If Okoye was a truly great player, he could have literally parked his car on top of Arians and Arians would have kept him.
Okoye was a bottom-of-the-roster guy, a converted discus thrower who has bounced around the league for the past couple of years. They saw what they needed to see, and they moved on.
For all we know, one or more great Cardinals players parked in the wrong spot without being cut or having their asses towed. When only eight of 1,000 hours of footage makes it into a show that is carefully manicured to only give use what the Cardinals and the league’s in-house film studio want us to see, a lot of things will be left out.
To the extent that Arians has a pet peeve about the parking of cars, creating the impression that Okoye was cut helps get the attention of the current players on the 2016 edition of the team. Not the great ones, who surely would survive a parking faux pas or two (or more), but the slappies who are scrounging for spots in the range of the roster where the churning that starts during the offseason never stops.
