TEMPE, Ariz. — The Arizona Cardinals have fired head coach Kliff Kingsbury 10 months after signing a contract extension through the 2027 season.
The team also announced that general manager Steve Keim has decided “to step down from his position to focus on his health”.
Like Kingsbury, Keim signed an extension in 2022 that extended his contract through the 2027 season. Keim, on the other hand, has been on leave since mid-December due to illness.
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Keim joined the Cardinals in 1999 as a college scout and was promoted to general manager in 2013 after years in human resources.
Kingsbury was hired in January 2019, just two months after he was fired from Texas Tech to revitalize a fledgling offense and struggling organization.
His release comes a day after the Cardinals lost their season finale 38-13 to the San Francisco 49ers and capped a season 4-13. Kingsbury finished his Cardinals career with a record of 28-37-1.
He had moderate success, leading Arizona to improved winning numbers in his first three seasons — from 5-10-1 in 2019 to 8-8 in 2020 and then in a 2021 season where the cards went 11-6 and the made the playoffs. However, Kingsbury’s tenure with the Cardinals was marred by late-season abandonments, underperforming and four years of undisciplined football.
That culminated in this final season.
Though Kingsbury had to coach a team without DeAndre Hopkins for the first six games, without Kyler Murray for the last five games, without tight end Zach Ertz for the last seven games, and at times without four of the Cardinals’ five offensive players this season, he was still relieved of his duties as the Cardinals set out to find their third head coach in the last six years. Although the Cardinals have been around for more than 100 years, a head coach has never been in office for more than six years.
Back-to-back late-season collapses in 2020 and 2021 overshadowed any success the Cardinals had built under Kingsbury, but it was also a trend. Since his days at Texas Tech, Kingsbury’s teams have been successful early in the season only to trend downward in the second half.
By 2021, Kingsbury’s teams went 42-20-1 in the first seven games and 17-44 thereafter. This season didn’t get off to such an impressive start, but things still fell apart on the backstretch. Arizona went 3-4 in its first seven games and then faltered to a 1-9 run.
Kingsbury believed this season would be a reversal of the last. Earlier in the season, he said several times that 2022 could be the opposite of 2021 — hopefully the Cardinals would finish strong after a slow start, partly due to Hopkins missing out on the first six games because of an infraction the NFL was banned from performance-enhancing drug policies.
Arizona also struggled to win at home, losing six straight games in late 2021 and early 2022.
A persistent problem with Kingsbury’s scheme was its inability to adapt.
After a Week 6 loss to the Seahawks, Murray said teams played the Cardinals’ offense softly and they “moved the ball methodically.”