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The cutthroat NFC West comes to primetime Sunday night football, with the division-leading Arizona Cardinals heading into the Pacific Northwest to take on Seattle.
Despite the fact that the Seahawks have been indifferent in 2015 – they sit at 4-4, two games behind the Cardinals – the trip out to Seattle is still one of the more difficult in football and Arizona get to test their mettle in front of a national NBC audience. Historically, the Cardinals have done their best work out of the spotlight that comes with a Sunday night showcase game, but this is a different and better Cardinals outfit than those who’ve taken on the primetime challenge in the past.
With quarterback Carson Palmer healthy and playing arguably the best football of a career that looked to have spluttered out after his departure from Cincinnati, the Cardinals are a serious and legitimate threat. A win Sunday night would give them a 3-game lead in the NFC West and, barring a calamitous series of injuries like they suffered last year, losing Palmer and others at the worst possible time, limping into a playoff campaign that should have been more fruitful than it turned out to be.
There are no such problems this year – so far, and fingers crossed – and the Cardinals are humming along nicely, if a little under the radar. That will change Sunday night, and the large chunk of the NFL world that hasn’t seen much of Arizona so far this year, will discover a very entertaining and high-scoring team. The Cardinals rank second in scoring (at nearly 33 points a game) and are fourth in both passing yards and total offense.
As those stats would suggest, Palmer airs it out to receivers Michael Floyd, John Brown and the evergreen superstar Larry Fitzgerald with regularity, and it works. Yet, the Cardinals are far from a one-dimensional squad. Not with Chris Johnson, another story of desert resurgence that rivals Palmer’s, dominating the ground game as he hasn’t done in many years. He has recorded four one hundred yard outings in the last six games, and is a vital cog in the offensive machine. Crucially, Arizona are 12-2 since the beginning of 2014 when Palmer plays.
The Cardinal defense is top-notch, and their secondary might just be the very best in the entire NFL. Patrick Peterson and Tyrann Mathieu lead a unit that is justly feared by opposing attacks. Watch, also, for Calais Campbell, an underrated defensive tackle who will look to take advantage of a weak Seattle offensive line and try to create turnovers as a result.
The entire Cardinal defense needs to limit Seattle QB Russell Wilson’s Wilson running. He’s the master of creating something from the ashes of a big play, and if he does it too often, he wins football games. The Arizona linebackers – led by Alex Okafor and Dwight Freeney – will earn their pay this weekend.
On the other side: Seattle, who started slowly last year, came down the home stretch like a hurricane through a small town, ending up in the Super Bowl, where they came perilously close to a second-straight championship. More now than ever before in 2015, the Seahawks are healthy, and when they’re healthy, you can’t discount them. After all, they didn’t reach two consecutive Super Bowls by accident.
The afore mentioned Russell Wilson, is an impressive 21-3 at home in his career. That alone makes Seattle no pushover, even with their record. He needs to remain upright, though, which has been a problem for the Seattle offensive line. Wilson has been sacked thirty-one times so far this season, but remained untouched in the Seahawks’ last outing, a win against Dallas. If he has time to make plays with his feet and get the ball into the hands of Doug Baldwin, Jermaine Kearse and tight end threat, Jimmy Graham, watch out. And then there’s Marshawn Lynch. He doesn’t like to talk to the media, but when he lets his game do the talking, Seattle generally win.
Lest we forget that the Seahawk defense is still stacked with A-grade talent – especially in the secondary, where Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor and Earl Thomas roam, ball hawks all three – and they have a history of stifling Arizona in these rivalry games. In fact, they did it twice last year, holding the Cardinals to a combined 420 yards and zero touchdowns, but both those occasions, Palmer was injured. It’ll be a different story this time around, of course, and I can’t wait to see how Pete Carroll’s defense handles Carroll’s former USC quarterback Palmer.
Prediction: a close, low-scoring game that the Cardinals win, by somewhere between 7 and 10 points.
Join The Roar for live scores and coverage of this pivotal NFC West showdown on Monday afternoon (AEDT) from 12:15pm.
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