Cardinals Chirp on NFL's Ridiculous Roughing the Passer Penalties

TEMPE -- The Arizona Cardinals returned to practice on Wednesday, and although some of their performances (or lack thereof) have been notable, talk around the league has been centered around recent calls for roughing the passer.

It's a subject that bounces between the lines of protecting quarterbacks and being a few steps away from flag football.

All 3 of these were called “roughing the passer” in just Week 5 alone pic.twitter.com/XmLUfwfbha
— Bad Sports Refs (@BadSportsRefs) October 11, 2022

Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury, a former NFL QB before picking up the headset, couldn't explain to reporters what exactly the latter of the law is.

“I cannot. I cannot [explain]. It’s been interesting. You know that (Buccaneers QB Tom) Brady’s going to get the call, but some of the other ones are—I don’t know. I don’t how you’re supposed to coach it at this point, but I think we’ve got to reel it in a little bit," said Kingsbury.

“There’s no coaching points because you can’t take that part—you’ve got to tell them to go after the ball and sack them. We haven’t adjusted anything on our end.”

Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray chimed in as well.

"I feel like I get hit sometimes and you know, maybe I haven't earned that respect yet. But the one the other day was pretty egregious. It was a strip-sack, right? Yeah, he came down with the ball. I mean, football is football. It's obviously gotten a little safer since we were kids playing pee-wee football, with all the protocols and stuff like that. I know they're trying to take care of the quarterbacks and stuff which I mean, I'm not arguing or complaining about. But I understand the defense's frustration and everybody watching because it's a physical game. We know what we signed up for. You got to try to protect yourself as best as possible. So hopefully they can get it right."

From a defensive player's perspective, safety Budda Baker took the high road:

There's a lot of discussion, but at the end of the day, we kind of try to talk, 'get that elbow' because as you guys can see there's a lot of different calls that could have gone either way," said Baker.

"So for us, we're taught on attacking that elbow and a strip-strip sack is still a sack. As long as you get the ball out, it's still a sack. Definitely that situation with those guys in the past where that guy got a stripped [sack] and he had the ball and yeah, he fell on top of QB but he still had the ball, so it was definitely questionable. But, at the end of the day, we got to play the game and we just got to let the refs handled everything else. We just got to play the game."

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