Detroit Lions vs. Arizona Cardinals: Complete Week 11 Preview for Arizona

The Arizona Cardinals begin life after Carson Palmer this week as they face the Detroit Lions at University of Phoenix Stadium. The Lions (7-2) are the NFC’s No. 2 seed, behind only the Cardinals (8-1), who have the best record in the NFL.

Much like last week against the St. Louis Rams, this game will be about how the interior offensive line protects the quarterback and opens lanes for running back Andre Ellington. Whereas Rams rookie defensive tackle Aaron Donald was the star of the show by using speed and elite moves to get by Arizona’s line, Lions star Ndamukong Suh will use brute strength to power through offensive guards Ted Larsen and Paul Fanaika—an area both struggle in regularly.

We will cover that a bit more later.

The Cardinals face the No. 2 seed in the NFC for the third time in four weeks. They are 2-0 in the first two matchups—wins over the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys, respectively—but in order to make it a third win and remain the NFL’s only one-loss team, Arizona will have to protect Stanton and open running lanes for Ellington, among other things.

Here is your in-depth preview of the Cardinals Week 11 matchup with the Lions.

Cardinals’ Week 10 Review

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We will keep this short since it’s going to bring up bad memories despite the big win over a division opponent. Palmer will miss the remainder of the season thanks to a torn ACL he suffered in the fourth quarter.

The Rams were in the game until Drew Stanton relieved Palmer and threw a 48-yard touchdown pass to rookie receiver John Brown, who made a fantastic play to haul in his fifth score in nine games.

Veteran receiver Larry Fitzgerald was the offensive weapon of choice against St. Louis, leading all receivers with nine receptions for 112 yards (12.4 yards per catch). After a slow start to the season, he now is the clear-cut No. 1 receiver on the team once again.

It looked as though Michael Floyd would be the team’s best receiver, but he has disappeared over the past six games.

Pressure was the name of the game on defense, as the Cardinals took down quarterback Austin Davis six times—by far a season high for Todd Bowles’ defense. That will be important once again this week as the Cardinals face Matthew Stafford and a Lions offense that can get hot in a hurry at any moment during a game.

News and Notes

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

Lindley Returns

With Palmer on the shelf the rest of the season, the Cardinals needed a third quarterback. Naturally, that third quarterback would be last year’s third quarterback, former sixth-round pick Ryan Lindley, according to Darren Urban of AZCardinals.com.

He knows head coach Bruce Arians’ offense, which is helpful in the event something happens to Stanton. It’s not yet known whether Lindley or rookie fourth-round pick Logan Thomas will be Stanton’s backup going forward, but at this point both options should be on the table.

For what it’s worth—and remember, Lindley’s only pass attempts as a pro came under former head coach Ken Whisenhunt—Lindley has a career 46.7 passer rating while throwing seven interceptions and zero touchdowns.

Teammates Confident Stanton Can Lead Cardinals

Perhaps to be expected, everyone on the team has rallied around Stanton this week. Fitzgerald made that point to Kyle Odegard of AZCardinals.com:

"

Drew is very confident in his ability, and we’re just as confident in him. He’s been with B.A. the longest out of anybody on our team. He’s got a great grasp of what’s expected of him in this offense and we’re going to rally behind him. We know we’re going to go out there and get great results with him.

"

Stanton must complete passes at a higher rate than he has so far this season. Coming into Sunday’s game against the Lions, he had completed just 49.5 percent of his passes.

His receivers have dropped seven passes on the season, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required), but even if you count those drops as receptions, his completion percentage jumps to 57.0 percent, which is still low.

His accuracy percentage, which is a formula put together by PFF, is just 62.4 percent, which if he qualified, would rank dead last among all starting quarterbacks and 4.5 percentage points behind the least-accurate qualifier, Cam Newton (66.9 percent).

Bowles’ Contract Extension

Does this mean Bowles will be around in 2015? As of this week, yes. But things change, and Bowles is this season’s head-coaching hot commodity. Speculation suggests he will be the leader of an NFL team next season, but the Cardinals are doing their best to entice him to stick around, giving him a two-year extension and raise, according to Kent Somers of AZCentral.com.

Just why he would leave his post after only two seasons and a boatload of success is curious, but that seems to be the popular thing to assume these days: If you’re a successful coordinator of a good team, you become the hot item to have during the inevitable head-coaching search the next offseason.

Arizona’s defense has been among the best in the league under Bowles. Since he arrived in 2013, the Cardinals have the No. 2 run defense in the NFL, allowing just 3.54 yards per carry. His defense has allowed the fifth-fewest points in his time with them, surrendering 19.76 points per game—Seattle (16.88) and San Francisco (18.96) rank first and third, respectively.

Someone gets fired after every season. There will be opportunity for Bowles to jump ship following the 2014 campaign and leave what he has built in Arizona. There is no guarantee he will, but there is also no guarantee he won’t. Not even this new contract can guarantee that, but Cardinals fans hope it convinces him to stay for a while longer.

Birdgang Boo-Boo Brigade

Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Player	Position	Injury	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Game Day
Lorenzo Alexander	OLB	Knee	LP	LP	-	-
Desmond Bishop	ILB	Hamstring	DNP	LP	-	-
Deone Bucannon	SS	Quad	LP	FP	-	-
Andre Ellington	RB	Foot/Hip	LP	LP	-	-
Ed Stinson	DE	Toe	DNP	DNP	-	-
Stepfan Taylor	RB	Calf	LP	LP	-	-
Dan Williams	NT	Elbow	LP	FP	-	-

All injury statuses gathered from AZCardinals.com

X-Factors and Matchups to Watch

Darryl Webb/Associated Press

Patrick Peterson vs. Calvin Johnson

The Cardinals beat the Lions last season despite Calvin Johnson turning in a great stat sheet, recording six receptions for 116 yards and two touchdowns. Four of those catches, 96 of the yards and both touchdowns came when Patrick Peterson was manned up against Megatron.

Peterson was caught in unfortunate positions on both touchdowns, and there was nothing more he could do. On the first, he would have tackled Johnson immediately after the catch had he not assumed linebacker Karlos Dansby came away with an interception and briefly stopped running.

To Peterson’s defense, Dansby should have had the pick; it went right through his hands. Instead of a turnover, it went 72 yards the other way for a score.

The second was a legal pick play Peterson had no time to get around before Johnson had hauled in his second touchdown.

Sunday will mark the third time in four seasons Peterson has faced off against Johnson. Though he has struggled at times this season due to an injury no one outside the organization knew about until after it had healed, Peterson has been outstanding of late, recording his first two interceptions last week in the win over the Rams and shutting down star receiver Dez Bryant in the win over the Cowboys two weeks ago.

Pay attention to this one on Sunday, because it will be a physical battle from start to finish. Hopefully referee Jerome Boger allows these two gladiators to go at it as they should. Taking them out of their element would ruin the matchup and could cost one of them dearly.

Interior Offensive Line vs. Lions Defensive Tackles

As mentioned at the outset, this will be the matchup to watch on Sunday. The guards did poorly against Donald and the Rams, allowing 11 of the 18 pressures the entire line allowed, according to PFF.

That’s poor, and it could be worse against the Lions.

Suh and C.J. Mosley will have a field day against Larsen and Fanaika on Sunday, and Suh will be enough of a problem that he could line up wherever he wants against the Cardinals and have success more often than not.

This season, Arizona’s guards have allowed a pressure once every 7.59 dropbacks according to numbers gathered from PFF. I took the liberty of calculating all pressures allowed from the guards on every NFL team, and that number ranks 30th in the league behind only the New Orleans Saints (7.47) and New York Jets (7.46) this season. Those teams have a combined 6-13 record this season.

The Cardinals don’t belong in the bottom of the league in pressures allowed per game by guards—the line has played so well this season and should be too good for that. Yet they are because Arians refuses to give his first-ever pick, Jonathan Cooper, a chance to show he’s back to his old self. Arians had this to say of the situation, according to Urban:

"

If [Cooper] was one of the best players, it’d be different. He hasn’t shown he is one of the best players. He’s gotten a lot better than he was and I think he has a great future as long as he continues to do what he’s doing. …

The consistency is everything, staying off the ground, everything that goes into playing. He gets his hands full with Calais (Campbell) every day on the scout team so I see improvement there. But there is nothing glaring where you’d say, ‘Take him out, put him in.’ That would be easy.

"

But there is something glaring. The stat above is glaring. Ellington’s 3.1 yards-per-carry average over the past six games is glaring. His 2.5 YPC average off both right and left tackle—where most of the time either Larsen or Fanaika are asked to pull ahead of him in the power-man scheme—is glaring.

This matchup will cause the Cardinals problems on offense all afternoon. It may be the single most important key to the game.

Cardinals’ X-Factor to Watch: Drew Stanton

He went 2-1 in place of Palmer earlier this season. The lone loss was a game against Peyton Manning and the Broncos in Denver that he kept close until he was knocked out of the contest with a concussion.

The Cardinals own the fourth quarter this season. Who knows what would have happened had he been able to finish that game.

Stanton has not been very efficient in the passing game. That was highlighted earlier. Drops have hurt, no doubt—they certainly hurt in Denver, when his receivers mishandled three passes. But Stanton has also missed wide open receivers badly at times.

He doesn’t have to out-gun Stafford in this game for the Cardinals to have a chance, but he does have to complete passes at a higher rate than 50 percent and continue to protect the ball. He has yet to turn the ball over this season, which is a big reason he was successful in leading the team to two wins early.

Prediction

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

If you’re looking for a high-scoring affair, you’ve come to the wrong place. Arizona is fifth in scoring defense, allowing 18.9 points per game. Detroit boasts the league’s best defense, yielding only 15.8 PPG.

Meanwhile, these offenses have not set the world on fire. The Cardinals rank 12th, averaging 24.8 PPG, while the Lions rank 23rd, at 20.2.

This game will come down to how these teams play within the trenches on both sides of the ball. Both defensive lines have an advantage here, because Detroit will be without stalwart right guard, former third-round pick Larry Warford. He injured his left knee early in last week’s win over the Miami Dolphins.

Luckily for Warford and the Lions, he won’t require surgery, as he told Tim Twentyman of DetroitLions.com:

"

I don’t think I’m going in for surgery or anything. I don’t think it was that serious…

My knee felt weird. It felt really loose. It hurt, but I was trying to play one more play. (DT Jared Odrick) made an inside move on me… I couldn’t really plant my foot or sustain myself and stabilize. I was just like, I can’t do this to the team. I’m hurting the team while I’m in right now. I was just like I have to get out.

"

Rushing the ball will be difficult for both squads. Not only are these teams in the top five in points allowed; they’re also in the top five in run defense. Arizona comes in at No. 4, allowing 3.35 yards per carry. Detroit allows 3.19 YPC, good for No. 2 in the league.

And given the fact both teams rank in the bottom three offensively in yards per carry this season, that just makes the point stronger that this game absolutely will not feature many successful run plays.

This should be a great game that could come down to which team protects the ball better. The Cardinals have a league-best plus-12 turnover margin this season. If they find a way to force Stafford into some errant throws and pick him off, chances are they will emerge victorious. Why? This:

Stafford has thrown at least one interception in 21 road games in his career. The Lions are 7-14 when that happens. Pick him off twice, and you’re guaranteed a win because the Lions are 0-6 when he’s picked off multiple times on the road.

Prediction: Cardinals 16, Lions 13

All stats gathered from Pro-Football-Reference.com unless otherwise stated.