The Arizona Cardinals owe a lot of their recent success to Carson Palmer and Larry Fitzgerald, and neither player has committed to playing beyond the upcoming season. Despite that, general manager Steve Keim says he is not concerned about 2017 being a “now or never” year for the team.
While Palmer is 37 and Fitzgerald will soon turn 34, Keim reminded everyone on Tuesday that the Cardinals have youth in other places.
“That window. We’ve got two great players with some age, but the rest of our team is not old—at all,” Keim said, via Peter King of The MMQB. “I don’t put a lot of stock in it. Look, we know we’ve got to get a long-term quarterback at some point, and we will. But we’ve got good youth all over our roster.”
Palmer struggled during Arizona’s disappointing 7-8-1 season last year, but he set career highs across the board in 2015. Fitzgerald’s past two seasons have been two of the best of his career, as he eclipsed the 100-reception mark in both.
Palmer chalked the bad year in 2016 up to bad luck, and he expressed similar thoughts to his GM about the “window” closing in Arizona.
“I hear the window thing, but in this league, I think you’re either rebuilding, or you’re overly optimistic,” Palmer said. “New England? They’re going 16-0. San Francisco? They’re rebuilding. And it’s never really exactly as it seems.”
In addition to retirement talk always swirling around Palmer and Fitzgerald, there have been rumblings that another important member of the organization could be close to calling it a career. As usual, the Cardinals will have to find a way to tune out all that talk and prove they can bounce back and be a playoff team once again.
H/T NFL.com
