Kliff Kingsbury: Have to evaluate, figure out how…

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The Cardinals opened the 2021 season with seven straight wins, but Monday night’s loss to the Rams ended their season in the Wild Card round of the playoffs and left them with a 4-7 mark over their final 11 games.

Second half struggles have been a theme of head coach Kliff Kingsbury’s three years with the team. They’ve gone 15-8-1 through the first eight weeks of those three seasons, but their record, including Monday’s loss, is 9-17 on the back end of their schedule. Kingsbury’s teams at Texas Tech experienced similar splits and the reason why this keeps happening wasn’t something the coach could put his finger on at a press conference on Tuesday.

“But the last couple, for whatever reasons, we haven’t been as sharp,” Kingsbury said, via the team’s website. “That’s something I have to continue to evaluate and figure out what we need to do, whether it’s practice structure or different things of that nature because we have to be better. This league is about closing strong and building momentum going into the playoffs and unfortunately we didn’t do that.”

There haven’t been signs out of Arizona that the latest slide and the blowout loss to the Rams have cost Kingsbury a shot at a fourth season in Arizona. Assuming that remains the case, a failure to put together a more complete effort the next time out would likely spell the end of his run in the desert.