The Cardinals tried to wring one more year out of Carson Palmer, and with him, one more run at a Super Bowl.
They can stop running now, and they start retooling.
It's been a heck of a five-year stretch, but on Sunday in London, the window closed on the Cardinals, the Palmer era and maybe the Bruce Arians era. At the very least, the time has arrived for Arians, general manager Steve Keim and the whole organization to recognize that whatever comes next, another quarterback will be part of it.
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The Cardinals have seen this movie before, and Palmer was three years younger when he last filled this role. His 2014 season was gutted by serious injury. Arians plugged in Drew Stanton, and they survived until right before the playoffs, when buckled in the face of Stanton’s own injury.
That was paradise compared to what they're dealing with now.
Palmer is now staring down the barrel of his 38th birthday and is expected to be out at least eight weeks with a broken arm. Stanton, the replacement again, is older, too. So is Larry Fitzgerald. The defense isn't what it was back then. David Johnson is out injured, too. The adrenaline of Adrian Peterson’s arrival either disappeared or was lost in customs while crossing the Atlantic.
The 33-0 beatdown by the Rams at Twickhenham Stadium was horrific. So was the moment Palmer suffered a broken left (non-throwing) arm. But worst of all, the thread of hope that they could overcome age and injury snapped.
Even Fitzgerald, generally optimistic and uplifting, couldn't mask the gloomy atmosphere afterward.
"There's no really positive way to sum it up, obviously," he said. "You say you have to go forward, and do all those things, but we all know ..." He signed, then continued, "That's a tough pill to swallow for us."
Chalk that up to the heat of the moment. But there are few signs that the gloom will lift as time passes.
Not that the Cardinals will lay down the rest of the season; that’s not how the veterans or Arians operate.
“We’ve played with Drew before," Arians said. "Drew’s played and won a lot of games for us."
Clearly, in this bizarre season, 3-4 doesn't eliminate anybody. Neither does not having depth at quarterback — although plenty of teams envy the Cardinals there, which says something. But a blowout of Sunday's proportions to an upstart division rival isn't exactly a positive omen.
As Arians also pointed out, the Cardinals have issues on both sides of the ball. Their front seven is not what it once was, and the absence of free-agent departure Calais Campbell gets more glaring by the week. The Rams rolled up 425 yards, were 13 for 19 on third down conversions and had more than double the time of possession.
Palmer and Stanton did little to help. Palmer was far from sharp in the games before that — even when including the overtime game-winning drive for one of their three wins, over the still-winless 49ers three weeks ago.
The Cardinals will have to just do a lot of patching and pasting the rest of the way. Their next reincarnation will have to be with a different quarterback. There was some brief retirement drama last offseason, before Palmer announced he wanted to return. That will start again, for sure.
But even as he rode the Palmer rollercoaster throughout their five years in the desert, Arians never put his heir apparent in place.
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The central figure when the Cardinals move forward obviously is Johnson, who might still play this season when his wrist heals. How much more Fitzgerald wants to play, or to play there, at age 34, remains to be seen. Even Arians finding the perfect Palmer replacement to plug in next season doesn't make this team an instant contender again.
The Cardinals were in the championship conversation for a while, right up until last year, when they couldn't maintain the glow of the previous year's NFC title-game trip.
That conversation is over. Whenever it starts again, a whole different group of Cardinals will be doing the talking.
