Cardinal

The Cardinals open the season under Mike LaFleur, hired in 2026 to lead a roster in a division where the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams have set the pace in recent years.

Few teams in the league can trace their line back as far. What began in 1898 as the Morgan Athletic Club on Chicago's South Side went through the Racine Cardinals and the Chicago Cardinals, survived a 1944 season spent merged with the Pittsburgh Steelers as the makeshift Card-Pitt, and carried the Cardinal name to St. Louis in 1960, then to Phoenix in 1988, before settling in Glendale in 2006. That continuity makes it the oldest professional football franchise still operating in the United States.

The championship history sits mostly in the club's early decades: NFL titles in 1925 and 1947, the latter won against the Philadelphia Eagles, and seven division titles spread across four different decades. The one modern high point, a run to Super Bowl XLIII in 2009 that also brought the franchise's only NFC Championship, ended in defeat to Pittsburgh. Older still is the rivalry with the Chicago Bears, dating to 1920, a reminder of where the club started before it moved on three separate occasions.

Home games are now played at State Farm Stadium, in Glendale.