After a 7-0 start to the season, not much is going right for the Arizona Cardinals. They suffered their third defeat in a row against the Colts. High time to sound the alarm.

Munich/Glendale – Crises quickly get out of hand and take on a life of their own. One phenomenon is that those involved watch and lose control bit by bit. You see it, you feel it, you do everything, and still it doesn’t help – success slips out of your hands.

The Arizona Cardinals are in this negative vortex at the moment. The euphoria of the hottest team of the first half of the season has cooled down noticeably, instead it is burning brightly and the alarm is being sounded.

You can see it and you can feel it

“We feel it. You can see it. Good teams don’t,” quarterback Kyler Murray said after a 16-22 loss to the Indianapolis Colts. It’s the third straight loss and the fifth in the last eight games.

One thing is clear: this is no longer a snapshot, but now a trend. One that does not look good. Because the former number one in the NFC has now fallen back to fifth place.

So right now, they don’t have a bye week coming up in the playoffs, but an away game at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with a 10-5 record in the Wild Card Round.

“We didn’t do that earlier in the season, but now you see it and it kills us at crucial moments when we don’t score touchdowns or prevent touchdowns because of it,” Murray criticised.

Kyler Murray: “This is bad football “

Head issue, he thinks. “Those are mental mistakes that we just can’t make anymore if we want to be where we want to be, if we want to win these games, and we’re supposed to win them. That’s bad football. “

“Bad football”: aptly summed up for games in which the Cardinals lacked much of what distinguished them in the first half of the season.

Starting with Murray himself, who performed at an MVP level in the first seven games until his ankle injury. Since his return in Week 13, the team has lost three of its four games, and in the three losses, Murray has posted QB ratings of 72.1, 72.9 and 85.9. In the first seven games alone, he was over 120 four times.

Arizona was missing three key offensive players against the Colts in wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins (knee), running back James Conner (heel) and centre Rodney Hudson (COVID-19 list), and its once-strong defence is also sputtering, with the absence of injured superstar J.J. Watt clearly noticeable. Especially against the Colts, eleven penalties for 85 yards and botched kicks by Matt Prater were added.

Kliff Kingsbury: “Gotta get it done “

Had Prater converted both his field goals and the extra point, the Cardinals would have booked their playoff ticket.

Coulda, woulda… As is the way in crises: sometimes it’s this, sometimes that, then generally a lot of things come together that don’t fit, and often new things too. Coach Kliff Kingsbury said the Cardinals “keep finding ways to lose critical situations and penalties and things like that. We have to kind of fix that.”

The problem with the slump now isn’t that a playoff berth still isn’t locked in, because the first post-2015 appearance is still pretty much assured.

The big danger: Despite this form, the postseason doesn’t completely fall through, but the franchise quickly goes down in this condition. Even more so with the bad vibes that come with it, with the pressure now mounting.

Because the parallels to 2020 are clear. The Cardinals were on course for the playoffs in mid-November with a 6-3 record, but completely blew the postseason with five losses in seven games, including two at 8-6 in the last two games.

A general head problem? A Murray problem or one under Kingsbury after all?

“We’ve just got to look in the mirror and stop making these mistakes,” Murray said, “Good teams don’t do that and right now we’re not doing what we need to do. You can’t do that in football. At the moment we’re killing ourselves.” There are two games left in the Regular Season, at the Dallas Cowboys and against the Seattle Seahawks.

High time to put words into action.