Cardinals

Nobody in the NFC West has been at it as long as the Cardinals, and the mileage shows: forty years chasing the Seattle Seahawks and the San Francisco 49ers has never once handed Arizona a division title to show for it. The Los Angeles Rams sharpen that edge further, and older grudges with the Chicago Bears and the Kansas City Chiefs, the latter fought out annually for the Governor's Cup, reach back to a version of this franchise that barely resembles the one playing in the desert now.

That earlier version was born in 1898 on Chicago's South Side as the Morgan Athletic Club, took the Racine Cardinals name from a street, and by 1920 sat among the charter members of the NFL, which makes it the oldest continuously run professional football operation in the country. Financial trouble pushed the club to St. Louis in 1960, and in 1988 it landed in Arizona, first at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe before State Farm Stadium in Glendale became home. The Bidwill family has owned it since Charles Bidwill Sr. bought in 1932; his grandson Michael has run the club since 2019.

Two NFL championships sit in the record, from 1925 and 1947, the first still argued over by historians who never quite accepted the Pottsville Maroons' suspension that handed it over. Since then the silverware has stayed empty, Super Bowl XLIII included, where Kurt Warner drove the offense to the brink before the Pittsburgh Steelers snatched it at the death, 27-23. Warner's number retired alongside Larry Fitzgerald's, whose hands defined the franchise for a generation the way Dick "Night Train" Lane's did decades earlier on the other side of the ball.

Kyler Murray now runs the offense, with Marvin Harrison Jr. and James Conner carrying the load and DeAndre Hopkins gone from the receiving corps he once anchored. The drought that follows this club longer than any other in North American professional sport gives every fresh season in Glendale its own private urgency.