Can the Cardinals turn around their fourth-quarter woes?
Arizona Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon insists there’s no “magic sauce” that would result in someone, anyone, making a play in the fourth quarter that would win a close games.
And he’s correct. It’s often said a team has to learn how to win as if it’s written somewhere how to make that happen.
It’s really as simple as explained by former Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians, who recently told Arizona Republic columnist Bob McManaman, “Somebody make a damn play to win the game!”
Arians added, “To lose three straight on the last play of the game, five one-score games, you’re talking about the bounce of the ball here or there. You’ve just got to finish. They’re right there in every game. Again, it’s just one play. You kind of catch fire when you make that play and you do it two or three times and all of a sudden, it’s, ‘Hey, we’re going to win these games.’”
He concluded, “The one thing we did when we were there is we won those close games.”
He’s correct about that. In the five seasons Arians coached the Cardinals, they were 49-30-1 in the regular season and 1-2 in the post-season.
Of those 80 regular-season games, the Cardinals were 24-10-1 in one-score games including three seasons where they were 6-1 and 5-1 twice. The one playoff win was also a one-score game.
The Cardinals are remarkably consistent in one-score games in the three seasons since Gannon became head coach: 2-5, 3-5 and 2-5 for a total of 7-15.
On Tuesday, Gannon talked about the message to players while emphasizing it’s not about making major changes.
He said, “Today’s team meeting, we showed them a couple of different things, a couple different games, how they can fall out. Typically, 70 percent of games come down to a one-score game (in) the fourth quarter. Then how do you come back from behind and win or how do you hold the lead and win. Every game looks a little bit different, but the details matter.”
The 70-percent figure represented the number of games that are within one score at some point in the fourth quarter.
He also told reporters, “There’s nothing drastic. There’s really not. If everyone does their job a little bit better, starting with me, we’ll have a better chance to get the result we want.”
Notably, the percentage of close games dropped after Week 8, when there was only one one-score game and only four that were one-score games at some point in the fourth quarter. The one-score games fell from 54.6 percent after seven weeks to 49.6 after eight and fourth-quarter games from 70.4 percent to 66.1.
Still, it’s all in the same range and separates winners from losers in the NFL. Coaches often say that most games come down to four or five plays and many are in the final 15 minutes.
Linebacker Zaven Collins repeated the statistic Tuesday and said, “I mean that’s almost every year in the NFL. So it’s something that we just got to learn from and then execute plays and make plays where we need to. Sometimes it’s just a couple plays here and there and that can cost you a game especially when it’s a good team like last two teams we’ve played.”
It often comes down to a team’s best players making those plays, whether it’s on offense or defense.
One example is edge rusher Josh Sweat, who signed a four-year, $76.4 million free-agent contract last March that included an $18.5 million signing bonus. That plus a $2.5 million base salary and a max $1 million per-game roster bonus puts his 2025 pay at $22 million, although some of the signing bonus is likely deferred to future years.
What have the Cardinals gotten for that? Sweat has 5.0 sacks for 30 yards, but none in the last two games. He also has 15 tackles (11 solo/seven for loss), seven quarterback hits, two forced fumbles and one pass breakup.
However, NFL gamebooks showed that Sweat’s name appeared only once in the fourth quarter of the team’s seven games and that was for a roughing the passer penalty in Week 2 against the Panthers.
The game book doesn’t specify QB hits or pressures, but there were no other numbers in any of the fourth quarters.
Of course, Sweat isn’t alone and it’s all a big reason why the last five games have been lost by a total of 13 points.
Repeating Arians’ mantra, “Somebody make a damn play to win the game!”
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