The Arizona Cardinals, who decided a year ago that Steve Wilks would be the ideal coach moving forward and after one season thought better of it, have now decided that Kliff Kingsbury will be the ideal coach moving forward. Yes, Kliff Kingsbury. The same coach who went 35-40 at Texas Tech, a mid-level team in one of the least powerful of the Power 5 conferences. The same coach who was fired by the Red Raiders. The same coach who couldn’t put a competent team around Patrick Mahomes, who already looks to be one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.
While the Cardinals may not have made a great hire (time will tell), they’ve done a great job of trying to dress it up. Apparently, too great of a job.
The Cardinals have revised the article announcing the hire on their official website to remove reference to the fact that Kingsbury possesses a largely-irrelevant resume point.
“Kingsbury is friends with Rams coach Sean McVay,” the article on AZCardinals.com originally stated. It has since been revised to say this: “Rams coach Sean McVay -- the 32-year-old offensive genius who has become the blueprint of many of the new coaching hires around the NFL -- reached out to Kingsbury after Texas Tech let him go to see if Kingsbury wanted to join the Rams’ staff for the stretch run and postseason as an offensive consultant. Kingsbury considered it but ultimately joined USC.”
The revision surely wasn’t stylistic or artistic or an attempt at correcting an error. The Cardinals were widely lampooned for touting Kingsbury based on a tenuous connection to McVay. And they’re still catching flak for referring to McVay as a “genius” in the article.
But McVay is a genius. And whether it’s the Packers or the Cardinals or surely someone else in this and future hiring cycles, there’s benefit in selling any and all connections to the coach whose reputation already exceeds his years, whether he likes it or not.