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There's palpable excitement in Arizona after Zay Jones signed for the Cardinals, propelling himself to the top of the depth chart with his new franchise. The team also drafted Marvin Harrison Jr., an NFL-ready wide receiver, with their first-round pick this year.
Fans will hope that this gives Kyler Murray the weapons to make a big push toward becoming competitive and making the playoffs. But the competition is fierce. For any run into the postseason to be considered a success, they will have to defeat other competitors in the NFC, including the defending conference champions, the San Francisco 49ers, whom they face twice in the NFC West.
Therefore, we decided to do an exercise to see how good does Zay Jones' addition to the Cardinals make them, especially within their conference. We took the depth chart of each NFC team from Ourlads.com and some other sources. We considered wide receiver trios of each team, taking the players who are expected to be top of the depth chart.
We considered only 2023 receiving yards statistics. While that may seem unfair to someone like Christian Watson of the Packers, who was beset with injuries, that seemed a fair method for us for someone coming back from a hiatus. For rookies, we used the following approximation:
- First Round pick = 1000 yards
- Second Round pick = 800 yards
- Third Round pick = 600 yards
Based on that we calculated where each time finished in terms of total yards from their top-rated slot receiver, right wideout, and left wideout. The table of that is given below.
The summary of the total yards is also given in the table below along with the rankings.
It immediately becomes clear that even with the addition of Zay Jones, the Cardinals are ranked towards the bottom of the NFC. In fact, only the Falcons do worse in total yards. Of course, if Darnell Mooney were suddenly to have a 1000-yard season as he did in 2021, that might change but he has not hit 500 yards for the past couple of seasons.
The bigger problem for the Cardinals, even after adding Zay Jone, is that everyone in their division in the NFC West is significantly ahead of them. All of them crack the top 10 of our wide receiver rankings in the conference. Therefore, while we do not want to put a dampener on the Cardinal's optimism going into the 2024 season, it may prove to be a slog. Of course, no model is a perfect prediction and they might yet surprise us.
Why are the Cardinals still slated to struggle despite adding Zay Jones?
Zay Jones had just 274 yards in eight games last season and he brings down the total for the Cardinals. Even if he does as well as he did in the 2022 season, that would net 823 yards. He has never had a year where he has reached 1,000 yards.
Therefore, while he is a good addition to the Arizona roster that is bereft of top players in the position, that does make the Cardinals one of the top wide receiver rooms in the league.
