Mike LaFleur is happy to keep last week’s win and eager to forget how it was built. On Friday, the day his team rehearses its plays inside the 20, the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals said a team that settles for field goals every time it gets close will not win often. “We can’t kick six field goals and expect to win football games,” he said, adding that his staff would clean it up before Sunday’s home game against the Denver Broncos.
The timing matters. Arizona is 2-4, Denver is 4-2, and the Cardinals now have to fix their finishing with a reshuffled interior line and without one of their best young defenders.
LIVE: HC Mike LaFleur https://t.co/2hhueMvRLO
— Arizona Cardinals (@AZCardinals) October 23, 2026
Eighteen points, no touchdowns
The 18-16 win at SoFi Stadium on Sunday, October 18, was all Chad Ryland. The kicker made all six of his attempts, from 34, 30, 22, 38, 27 and finally 43 yards as time ran out, after Matthew Stafford had put the Rams ahead with 47 seconds left. Arizona reached the red zone five times and scored no touchdowns on any of those trips.
Everything else about the offense worked well enough. The Cardinals ran 70 plays, gained 338 yards and held the ball for 34 minutes and 52 seconds. Jacoby Brissett completed 24 of 35 passes for 218 yards, Bam Knight ran 15 times for 80 yards and Trey McBride caught seven passes. The drive-length numbers tell the same story over six weeks: Arizona leads the league with 17 scoring drives of ten plays or more and has finished 15 of them with points, but only eight with touchdowns. Its red-zone rate for the season is 48 percent.
LaFleur said he did not want to overreact to one bad afternoon near the goal line. Brissett and McBride, who leads the NFL in catches, both described the problem as execution on single plays rather than a broken plan.
A third guard down
The running game, which matters most in tight spaces, gets harder this week. Jon Gaines II, the starter at right guard, was injured during Thursday’s practice (knee and ankle) and is out for Sunday, and Chase Bisontis and Isaiah Adams are already on injured reserve. Hayden Conner will start next to right tackle Elijah Wilkinson, who called it a “next-man mentality” for the whole room.
On defense, Walter Nolen III is out with an ankle injury, though LaFleur does not expect it to mean injured reserve. Darius Robinson, who has averaged 22.2 snaps a game, should take more of the work, and defensive coordinator Nick Rallis said the game has slowed down for him. Running back Jeremiyah Love is out again with his own ankle injury.
The opponent and the occasion
Denver has won without much offense. The Broncos average 252.2 yards and 19 points a game, the second-lowest yardage total in the league, and they have not been easy to score on either. At halftime, Larry Fitzgerald will enter the club’s Ring of Honor, receive his Hall of Fame ring and see his No. 11 retired. He scored 121 touchdowns as a Cardinal, so the timing of the red-zone talk is hard to miss.
What comes next
The Broncos visit State Farm Stadium on Sunday, October 25, at 4:05 p.m. EDT (Game Center). Arizona then travels to the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday, November 1.
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