Kliff Kingsbury may have been 2,000 miles away. But to all the Cardinals players and coaches on the other end of the Zoom feed on Saturday night, he might as well have been right there with them in the team’s Cleveland hotel. And that’s not only because they were all on Zoom anyway, since nothing could be in person, per NFL-mandated intensive protocols enacted after Arizona turned up a handful of positive tests at the end of last week.
It was also because his message drilled home a simple point that quickly alleviated the shock of a football team losing its head coach the day before a game.
“He told them that we had worked for this,” defensive coordinator Vance Joseph told me on Sunday night. “And that the work was already done.”
No one in Arizona asked for 2020 to rear its head again, with the Cardinals' 2021 season going the way it has. But if the pandemic’s shown us all one thing, it’s that COVID-19 doesn’t mind being an unwelcome guest at an inopportune time. So it was that Chandler Jones and a couple of executives returned positive tests last week. That sent Arizona into the intensive protocols, and on Friday, resulting daily testing turned up positive tests for Kingsbury, quarterbacks coach Cam Turner and defensive lineman Zach Allen.
Kingsbury received the news about his own test on Friday afternoon.
About 48 hours later, Arizona backup quarterback Colt McCoy was taking knees and Kingsbury’s Cardinals were salting away a 37-14 road rout of the favored Browns.
In between, there was a real-life scramble drill by the coaching staff on Friday, decisions made on splitting responsibilities that night, changing travel plans and a couple more rounds of tests that led to just one more player being shelved in Cleveland. Then, there was a game played, and a team that found out just a little more about itself and how far it's come in getting from 5–0 to 6–0.
And after that, owner Michael Bidwill brought Kingsbury into the winning locker room via FaceTime, and the players exploded when they saw their coach.
Kingsbury smiled. He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to, of course.
What he’d said on Saturday night had come true. By the time all hell broke loose on the Cardinals, the work was done and Kingsbury’s team was ready to show the NFL, again, just who it was. Most of all, they were ready for whatever came their way.
“I’m just really proud of how they all rallied together and got it done,” said Kingsbury, via text from Arizona on Sunday. “Nobody even blinked. Just went out there and got the win."
