The Cardinals saw off the Mastings 41 to 31 on Saturday evening in what proved to be a straightforward affair for the hosts. It was a regular-season meeting in the NFL, and the final score reflected a team that had settled into its rhythm by then. The visitors made a decent fist of it, but the home side simply had too much about them on this occasion.
There is something about a scoreline like that that tells you where the game was won. The Cardinals were not playing their best football from the first minute, but they found another gear when it mattered. And here's the thing — they had been building toward this sort of performance, even if the 38-41 defeat to the Rebels the week before suggested otherwise.
The Mastings arrived with some momentum of their own, having put up 56 in their last outing and edged past the Seminoles 27-24 before that. They were not a team to write off lightly. But they came up against a Cardinals side that had already beaten the Wildcats 59-13, and that sort of consistency is what separates the contenders from the rest.
What struck me watching was not so much the points on the board, but the way the home side controlled the tempo. They did not need to go for broke; they simply kept their structure intact and let the visitors chase shadows. To be fair, the Mastings showed character, but character does not always translate into results.
The win takes the Cardinals further ahead in the standings, whatever position they occupy. The Mastings will need to look at this one and work out where the margins went against them. It was not a dramatic contest, but sometimes the unglamorous ones are the ones that matter most.
