The Arizona Cardinals are doing work to dominate the NFL’s wide receiver discourse over the past week. Not in a good way, mind you.
Four days after trading a first-round pick for Marquise “Hollywood” Brown — a wide receiver who ranked 103rd in the league last season with 6.9 yards per target — the Cardinals wound up in the spotlight again. Monday, the league announced five-time All-Pro wideout DeAndre Hopkins will be suspended for the first six games of the 2022 regular season after violating the NFL’s policy on performance enhancing drugs.
It’s a damaging blow in what’s been the nadir of a stellar pro career. Hopkins had season-long lows of just 42 catches and 572 receiving yards after playing only 10 games in 2021 due to injury. As a result, he missed Arizona’s first playoff appearance since 2016 — an uncompetitive 34-11 loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams.
Hopkins’ scheduled absence puts an even greater spotlight on the Brown trade. The former Raven and first-round pick is coming off a season in which he recorded his first 1,000-yard campaign, despite only having starting quarterback Lamar Jackson in the lineup for 12 games.
However, his 1.71 yards per target ranked 36th among 46 receivers with at least 100 targets last season. That was almost a yard less than Hopkins averaged in 2022 — and that was one of his least efficient seasons as a pro. It was also 10 spots lower than Christian Kirk, the Arizona wide receiver who left for a four-year, $72 million contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars this spring.
If Brown can’t replace Hopkins’ production, things could go very poorly for a Cardinal team stuck in the same division as each of the NFC Championship Game finalists. Arizona went 3-5 last season in the 10 games Hopkins missed, though it’s fair to note those came late in the season. Falling apart once the weather turns cold has become an unwelcome tradition for head coach Kliff Kingsbury. He’s just 8-17 over the final eight games of the regular season and playoffs in his three seasons leading the Cards.
Arizona may not get the chance to fade down the stretch if Hopkins’ absence prevents the team from shining at the start of the season. Without the team’s presumptive WR1 in the lineup, Kyler Murray’s wideout cache currently looks something like this:
- Brown
- Rondale Moore
- AJ Green
- Andy Isabella
- Antoine Wesley
- Andre Baccellia
That’s not awful, but there’s a limited amount of looks Kingsbury can throw out there based on what we saw in 2021. Brown was mostly a short-range target for Baltimore. Moore (average pass depth: 1.4 yards downfield) was DEFINITELY a short-range target. Green was a 32-year-old, useful deep/intermediate threat who faded as the season went on (10.6 yards/target and a 67.4 percent catch rate in his first eight games, 8.0 yards/target and 51 percent catch rate in the final eight).
Hopkins averaged nine yards per target depth in his Cardinal debut in 2020 and upped that to more than 12 last season. That flexibility is vital to opening up the rest of the field for the players around him. In short, no one on the roster, either in 2021 or 2022, can do what he does.
This means Brown will have to step up, but also that 2022 second-round draft pick Trey McBride will see plenty of action early in two-tight end sets bookending Zach Ertz. Ertz was solid in his first half-season in Glendale, putting up a full-season pace equivalent to an 87-catch, 887-yard campaign in his 11 weeks as a Cardinal. He’s also going to turn 32 years old this season and was limited to only three catches for 21 yards in his team’s playoff loss.
McBride can bring instant relief as a guy who had 1,121 receiving yards in 12 games for a very bad Colorado State team last season. He’ll be relied on to get loose up the seam in order to clear space for Brown to smash toward big gains in the middle of the field.
Kingsbury came into the season with a hot seat, despite an 11-win campaign and a playoff berth, thanks to his inability to make adjustments as the season goes on. Now, he’s been tasked with making some major changes to start the year and heavily incorporate a brand-new wideout and rookie tight end in order to mitigate the loss of one of the NFL’s best receivers.
That would be a lot for even a proven head coach to handle. If Kingsbury can’t rise to the occasion, it could halt Arizona’s playoff streak at one — and portend doom for a flashy coaching hire who is great at winning games in September but unable to push through adversity later in the year.
