This whole thing may be purely academic; the Cardinals are zeroing in on a road wild-card game, and Drew Stanton will probably be back by then. But, for the NFL completists out there: the third-stringer appears to have regained the inside track from the fourth-stringer for a likely-meaningless Week 17.
Arizona will reportedly go back to Ryan Lindley for Sunday's regular-season finale against San Francisco, just days after naming Logan Thomas the starter. Lindley was bad last week, 18-for-44 for 216 yards and an INT, but then, lots of QBs look bad against the Seahawks. Still, Bruce Arians had on Monday named Thomas his starter, while warning that he could have "a quick hook."
All it took was one bad practice, and that hook came for Thomas like he was some woeful vaudevillian.
"He's worked, fundamentally, extremely hard and gotten much better," Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said. "But putting those fundamentals to use in the offense, that's two totally different things."
(How bad could that practice possibly have been? The only thing that makes sense is if it quickly became clear that Thomas doesn't know the offense. Or maybe Lindley asked really, really nicely for another chance; we won't speculate.)
Arians has already said that Stanton will be the starter if he's healthy in time for the playoffs, and two days ago estimated those chances at 85 percent. So Sunday is more or less an audition to be his playoff backup. But we are admittedly curious to see if Lindley will ever throw a touchdown: over his career, he has thrown 225 pass attempts without successfully finding the end zone, an NFL record.
