Kyler Murray. Photo Credit: CNN
There’s a special kind of pain reserved for Arizona Cardinals fans, a uniquely torturous experience that somehow manages to feel both fresh and numbingly familiar with each passing season. The latest chapter? Benching Kyler Murray, the franchise quarterback they gave a $230 million contract extension to just two years ago. It’s not just a personnel decision; it’s a billboard announcement of yet another rebuild in a franchise that treats rebuilds like some teams treat training camp.
Welcome back to the factory of sadness, Cardinals fans. The conveyor belt never stops.
The Murray benching encapsulates everything wrong with this organization. Here’s a player who was supposed to be the answer…the dynamic, dual-threat quarterback who would finally break the curse. Instead, he’s become another data point in Arizona’s endless cycle of hope and disappointment. Was Murray perfect? Far from it. But the revolving door of coaches, coordinators, and front office philosophies surrounding him ensured he never had a real chance to develop consistently. Now he’s paying the price for organizational dysfunction with a clipboard in his hand.
This is how the Cardinals operate: mortgage the future on a decision, realize it’s not working, panic, blow it up, repeat. Remember when they traded for Josh Rosen, then drafted Murray the very next year? Remember when they hired Kliff Kingsbury to unlock Murray’s potential, then fired him after four years of mediocrity? Remember when they brought in DeAndre Hopkins, watched him dominate, then traded him away? The Cardinals don’t build; they churn.
The problem isn’t any single player or coach—it’s the rot at the top. Michael Bidwill’s tenure as owner has been defined by short-term thinking, reactive decision-making, and a complete inability to establish sustainable success. The franchise has had one playoff win since 2009. One. In 15 years. That’s not bad luck; that’s bad ownership creating bad culture, which produces bad results.
There’s no continuity, no coherent vision, no organizational identity beyond “try something, fail, try something else.” Every few years brings a new regime promising to finally get it right, and every few years Cardinals fans watch the same movie with different actors. The settings change—from University of Phoenix Stadium to State Farm Stadium—but the plot remains depressingly constant.
Other franchises have figured out how to build winning cultures. They hire smart people, give them time and resources, and trust the process. The Cardinals hire people, give them impossible situations, then fire them when they can’t perform miracles. Then they genuinely seem surprised when the next hire fails too.
Benching Murray signals another painful reset. Journeyman replacement quarterback Jacoby Brissett offered the slightest bit of hope with a strong win in his first week of starting, but this past week’s blowout loss against the San Francisco 49ers demonstrated this team’s fool’s gold nature: a statline (47-57 passing for 452 yards) which looks great if you didn’t watch the game, one which was never competitive. Next up? More draft capital spent on a quarterback prospect. More years of “building.” More excuses about injuries, about schemes, about anything except the real problem: the organization itself.
Being a Cardinals fan means accepting that hope is a setup for heartbreak, that every promising beginning is just the first act in a tragedy, and that the factory of sadness never closes. It just changes shift supervisors and keeps producing the same product.
At least we’re consistent at something.