The Arizona Cardinals have been troubled since 1947, before the team moved from Chicago to St. Louis and then St. Louis to Arizona and then experimented with Phoenix and Arizona as the city name. The franchise has been completely left out of the postseason talk for years. The last time the Cardinals made the playoffs was in 1998 when Jake Plummer was the starting quarterback and the NFL was wondering if he was the next Brett Favre. That team beat the Cowboys for their first playoff victory since 1947 and then lost badly to the Vikings.
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No Cardinals team since has been able to reach the playoffs since. The team was under the thumb of the St. Louis Rams and the Seattle Seahawks, but age has caught up with both those teams and the time for Arizona to start thinking about playoff tickets is now. The Cardinals play in a division in which the Rams self-destructed last season, the Seahawks lost their running game, and the 49ers have continued to struggle. It has been a decade, but the Cardinals could finally see some playing time beyond the regular season again.
The team will need Kurt Warner and Edgerrin James to hold up for the entire season. Both players have had incredible careers elsewhere but have been victims of front offices worrying that they were too old to keep being effective. While James has been consistent, Warner has been battling with Leinart for the starting job for the past couple years. Now it is his to lose. He will have to excellent targets in Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald. Boldin has been distracted by a contract that pales in comparison to Fitzgerald’s. Hopefully this will prove not to be too big of a distraction, other wise the Cardinals playoff tickets that seem so close will drift away.