Arizona Cardinals 2026: The Coverage Report — 39 cutdown calls on the board, one graded
This is a measure of our tracked sources — podcasts, national shows, written outlets we ingest — not of all football media. A team can be everywhere on local radio and still be thin in here.
The Arizona Cardinals are thin in here.
The baseline: 31st of 32 in graded takes
Across all 32 clubs, our database holds 6,785 graded takes. Arizona accounts for 130 of them — 1.9 percent, where an even split would be 3.1 percent. Only the Panthers (120) have fewer. The Chiefs, at 389, have three times as many. The median club sits at about 207 graded takes; Arizona is at 63 percent of that.
Raw volume tells a slightly softer version of the same story: 446 total takes about the Cardinals, 28th of 32, ahead of the Titans, Panthers, Colts and Falcons and well behind the Bills (999) and Rams (866).
The results did not earn that silence, exactly — they earned a different kind of attention. Arizona went 3-14 in 2025, its worst season in the span we hold, and picked third in the 2026 draft, where it took Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love, followed by Chase Bisontis at 34, Carson Beck at 65, Reggie Virgil at 143 and Jayden Williams at 217. A top-three pick is exactly the sort of thing that pulls national coverage, and it shows: of Arizona's 130 graded takes, 71 are mock-draft picks. Take the draft out and the tracked field has said very little about this team that has actually settled.
The cutdown: 39 calls, one grade, and it is from last February
The news hook of this series is the 53-man roster. We hold 39 roster-spot takes about the Cardinals. Exactly one is graded, and it is Gregg Rosenthal at the 2025 combine saying Jonah Williams "will remain on The Cardinals" — accuracy 100, skill 0, because the naive baseline (he was on somebody's 53 last season) said the same thing.
Every call from the 2026 cutdown cycle is still pending. So there are no graded surprises to lead with, and pretending otherwise would be inventing a scoreboard. What we can do is put the field's positions on the record before the grades land.
The most-argued name is running back Trey Benson. In March, two people said flatly that he was safe. Asked whether Benson would make it out of camp, Alex Clancy answered: "Yes. A million." Jamil Douglas: "So Trey Benson will make it out of training camp for sure. ... He will be on the team. He will have a role." By August the beat had moved the other way — Donnie Druin on August 9: "if you ask us — he's on the outside looking in of the roster," and Nathan Jahnke on August 24: "Benson is unlikely to make the roster at this point." Druin's August 24 piece is logged with Bam Knight having locked the final back spot, "which contributed to Trey Benson being waived/injured."
The rest of the board, all pending:
- Bam Knight (RB) — Druin, four separate times, most recently that Knight "clearly has that final spot taken"; Jahnke says his chances "have continued to increase."
- BJ Ojulari (LB) vs Eku Leota (LB) — Druin has Leota beating out the former second-round pick: "He didn't make the team in our final roster projections with Eku Leota usurping him."
- Sixth receiver — Druin favors Jalen Brooks over Ihmir Smith-Marsette; Jahnke floats Smith-Marsette over Devin Duvernay, while separately calling Duvernay "locked into a roster spot" on special teams.
- Reggie Virgil (WR) — Jahnke, in four straight PFF recaps: the fifth-rounder makes it despite not climbing the depth chart.
- Others named: Kedon Slovis and Olisaemeka Udoh as cuts, Kitan Crawford and Jayden Williams as locks, Elijah Jones as the likely corner casualty.
When those grade, this section gets a scoreboard. Today it has a ledger.
What actually carries grades
| Kind | Takes | Graded | Avg accuracy | Avg skill |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mock draft picks | 85 | 71 | 68.3 | 35.5 |
| Trade and signing | 31 | 16 | 50.0 | −18.8 |
| Sleeper calls | 30 | 9 | 55.6 | −7.3 |
| Depth chart | 120 | 8 | 94.8 | 5.9 |
| Positional finishes | 25 | 8 | 59.4 | 27.7 |
| Game outcomes | 6 | 4 | 100 | 89.0 |
Note the depth-chart line: 120 takes, 8 graded. Most of what gets said about this roster has not resolved.
The draft calls are the strong suit, and they are mostly one pick. Love at No. 3 was called correctly by Mike Renner, Vinnie Iyer, Nick Shook and KC Laboratory, all at accuracy 100. The misses at the same slot were Arvell Reese (Pat Fitzmaurice, Field Yates) and Rueben Bain (Fitzmaurice), each graded at 0 with the note that the player went undrafted. One caveat on hygiene: Lance Zierlein's final mock had Love to Arizona at 3, but the take is logged twice, once at 100 and once at 0 under a garbled spelling matched to no drafted player. We flag it rather than average it.
The weak suit is free agency, and it is a genre problem. Eight of the 16 graded trade-and-signing calls scored zero, and every one of them was somebody assigning a veteran to Arizona who never arrived: Aaron Rodgers (Renner, Tom Strachan), Malik Willis (Paul Pabst, Renner), Kenneth Walker III (Jake Ciely), Breece Hall (Rich Eisen), Kirk Cousins (Jonathan Jones), D.J. Reed (Bobby Skinner). Cap space made Arizona the default answer to every "where does he land" question, and the default answer was wrong every time.
On the players, the field split cleanly. Trey McBride was the payoff: Derek Brown and Mason Dodd both took him as a sleeper and both scored skill 200 when he finished TE1, and Mike Florio and Tony Gonzalez called the TE1 finish outright. The two young Cardinals the field kept buying went the other way. Marvin Harrison Jr. finished WR48: Chris Brockman took −200 on him, Cynthia Frelund's model projected eight receiving touchdowns against four actual, and Fitzmaurice ranked him WR22 in Week 9. Benson finished RB79, producing three separate −200 sleeper grades (Ciely, Andrew Erickson, Dodd).
Season-level, nobody got near it. Colin Cowherd said Arizona "can win ten to eleven games" against an actual three. Dan Patrick had them as a playoff team, graded −200. LaVar Arrington picked them to win the NFC West twice; the division-winner line for Arizona is 3 graded, 0 accuracy.
Who has a record here
Six pundits clear five graded Cardinals takes. None clears ten, which is our floor for ranking people, so treat this as an attendance sheet rather than a leaderboard: Kyle Crabbs (8), Daniel Jeremiah (6), Rosenthal (6), Fitzmaurice (5), Renner (5), David Harrison (5). At the outlet level the deepest graded pools are The Herd (23) and Move the Sticks (13); Locked On Cardinals has 29 takes on the club but only four graded.
That is the whole picture. Arizona punditry in our tracked field is a draft-week spike, a free-agency guessing game that went 0-for-8 on landing spots, and 38 cutdown calls waiting on a grade.