6 Winners and Losers from Arizona’s Loss to Seattle

Another tough game in the books for the young and growing roster, as the team finds themselves looking up from a 0-3-1 hole. As always, we’ll take a deeper look into this game in a vacuum and try to glean what we can and see who stood out, who didn’t, and who might have helped/hurt their trajectories going forward.

Winners:

Larry Fitzgerald: The legend continues to gather accolades as he makes the run on the back nine of his career, today surpassing Tony Gonzalez’s career receptions mark of 1,325, now second only to Jerry Rice. He may not be racking up the numbers he was early on in this season, but as the long threat among the wide receiving unit, he continues to carry the passing game.

Byron Murphy: After some hot and cold performances, the rookie corner had a fine day against Seattle, breaking up several passes. Among those were several would-be scores in the red zone and a near interception.

Terrell Suggs: The veteran OLB was hunting in the Seahawks’s backfield yesterday, both stopping runs for loss and bringing down Russell Wilson, nearly coming up with a turnover doing so.

Honorable Mention(s): There were some struggles today, but it was nice to see Kyler Murray make a jump in passing efficiency after struggling to do so in last week’s matchup. Chase Edmonds also put forth a solid effort on the ground, making the case for more opportunities going forward.

Losers:

Tight End Defense... again: It’s becoming a joke at this point, for the fourth week in a row a tight end gets the better of the defensive unit. While not passing the century mark in yards like others have, Will Dissly lead the Seattle passing attack with 57 yards and their lone touchdown, coming on a breakdown in coverage. You can basically earmark this team for an opposing tight end to perform until proven otherwise. This isn’t a fantasy column, but it wouldn’t hurt to pick up Tyler Eifert if you could use a streamer.

Zane Gonzalez: After literally performing at a perfect pace going back through the preseason, Gonzalez had two misses today, one at 43 yards out and the other 48. It’s hard to be too critical of his performance, he was due a miss, but you didn’t expect a pair of them in one day.

The Wide Receivers: With Damiere Byrd out nursing a hamstring injury, the chance was ripe for one of the other young receivers to stand out. Unfortunately a WR corps that has struggled all year to create consistent separation continued to do so. To add to that, Christian Kirk appeared to suffer a nasty ankle injury, the severity of which we’ve yet to find out about.

Honorable Mention(s): Chris Jones was taken off the field later in the game in favor of Kevin Peterson. I’d be surprised if he continues to get the starter’s share of snaps after this week. The DL continues to take hits, with Zach Allen suffering an injury of unknown severity at the time of this writing. Peters also continues to get nicked up here and there, the team will have to try to ration out his snaps if they want to keep their best D-lineman at peak performance. They did well enough in the run phase, but the OL is still struggling to provide adequate protection for their rookie quarterback. While not all the sacks were on them, the intermediate and deep passing game is still hampered and receiver separation only compounded with limited time for those routes to develop.