No NFL team in their right mind would ever enter a season expecting to make it through unscathed, but the Arizona Cardinals’ injury luck has been unusually poor this season.
According to a Sports Info Solutions study that ran through Week 16, the Cardinals missed the most total points (each injured player’s total points over their previous 17 games multiplied by the number of games missed) and the fourth most total games missed in the NFL.
Their 216 points missed was 34 more than the second-place Washington Commanders (182), which is a bigger gap than the one between the Commanders and the seventh-place Atlanta Falcons (151).
“Those are things that we constantly have to look at,” Cardinals general manager Monti Ossenfort told Arizona Sports’ Wolf & Luke on Friday.
“I think every injury is different and I think we have run the gamut this year of there’s probably some bad luck and … we’re trying to look for the common denominator in those things, and I don’t know that there is (one).”
He pointed out there’s been some instances of soft-tissue injuries and others that aren’t, or some instances of injuries happening in the contact of the play and others happening away from it.
Budda Baker (concussion), Garrett Williams (Achilles) and Josh Sweat (ankle) in the last game alone showed the wide-ranging aspects of ailments the team has had to deal with.
“Unfortunately in football, there’s a lot of things you can’t control,” Ossenfort said. “But what we gotta do is look at things that we can control that can help our players and prepare them. But unfortunately, injuries are a part of the game and those are things that we have to deal with.”
It puts Ossenfort in a precarious position needing to evaluate not only the talent that’s out there replacing injured players, but also the coaches who don’t have the intended tools to use.
Nevertheless, the GM said he believes the talent needed to have success when it has relative average health is already in the building.
