LaFleur hire is 'exciting' for the Cardinals
Mike Florio and Chris Simms react to the Arizona Cardinals hiring Mike LaFleur as its next head coach, discussing Lafleur's previous stops with creative offensive football minds.
Video Transcript
You mentioned Mike LaFleur.
Yeah.
He's gonna leave the Rams as offensive coordinator, and stay in the division- Woo!
-to become the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals.
And when I was thinking earlier about, like, what team would be a good example of team that has no cachet if they were on the market, the Cardinals would be that team.
Yeah, yeah.
I went from the Cardinals- Yeah, right ... back to the Browns, because the Browns are not dysfunctional.
so that, that was the last one, and look, the Cardinals have just been in this perpetual spiral.
They've been around for 110 years.
They've never had a coach more than six seasons.
I don't know.
You felt last year like they were starting to move in the right direction.
Yeah, I did.
They had- they, they started 2 and 0, they had close losses, and then the wheels just came off.
Yeah.
Never They, they needed a coach like a Vrabel, like we're talking about, that could've just found a way to win the football game there when they were losing all those three- and four-point games, right?
They went through a period there where I think they lo- lost, what, four or five in a row by no more than three points, something like that, which, which was incredible.
But that's where, again, you look at it and go, "Wait, the team was competitive in there," but we just You know, whether it's maybe some of the quarterback play, which I think we could probably talk about in Arizona sh- too.
But great coaches can find ways to, "I can be worth four points and make us win that game by one point," or, "I can be one more score for us today," and they never got that.
And we'll see.
Mike LaFleur, again, here we are.
Ring-ding-ding, come right down, you're from the Shanahan-McVay coaching tree.
You're allowed to be a head coach now.
I mean, that's what it is, and I think he learned from his m- mistakes with the New York Jets, where he probably wasn't ready to call plays and be in that environment yet, especially with the number two pick in the draft, and have to develop him there.
But then he gets to go back to the lab with McVay, and learn a few things from him.
And I can tell you from personal experience here, too, behind the curtain, like, man, when he went And I think I've told you this.
When he went to McVay, and Shanahan was like, I know Kyle Shanahan was like, "Oh, gosh, Mike LaFleur's going with the Rams.
You know, nobody knows my run system better than Mike LaFleur, and he's gonna teach Sean and McVay all my little tricks about my run offense that I don't want him to teach them," right?
So Mike LaFleur gets to go there.
He gets to show Sean McVay a few of the Shanahan run game tricks.
Then he gets to steal from McVay's pass game, and how he packages things together, and again, out of what's left out there, yeah, Mike LaFleur, I think, is exciting.
He'd be the next guy down after Klint Kubiak to go, "Okay, he's been around some good offenses, some good teams.
He knows how it's, it's run," and I don't think the Arizona offense is too far off.
They need one big-time playmaker.
They're missing a big-time playmaker.
The O-line's okay.
They got a good group of receivers, but nobody that scares you on either side of the ball, maybe, and that's where I think he and Monte Austin Fort will have to go to the lab this, this off-
