Written by Sam Gardner at FoxSports.com
A hard-luck year nearly got worse for the Arizona Cardinals this winter when reports surfaced that quarterback Carson Palmer and wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald were both considering retirement following a season that saw the club regress from 13-3 and the brink of the Super Bowl to 7-8-1 and the middle of the pack in the NFC.
Those concerns — that the team would be forced to replace franchise cornerstones at two vitally important positions — were eventually alleviated when Palmer, 37, and Fitzgerald, 33, each announced in February that they’d be returning for 2017. But the future of the quarterback position, in particular, is still of great concern to Cardinals GM Steve Keim, who acknowledged recently that he’d be forced to address the situation soon, regardless of Palmer’s status beyond this year.
“It is a tough balance, but that’s my job, to look at the long-term health of the organization,” Keim said last week at the NFL Combine. “So we have to make those kinds of decisions. And really, to me, there’s no better time to take a young quarterback (than) when you have a guy like Carson, who can help develop him.”
A longtime member of the Cardinals organization who was promoted to the GM role in 2013, Keim spoke with Palmer the night before the veteran announced his decision to return, and said that Palmer was open to the idea of mentoring his eventual replacement. However Palmer, who is set to earn a base salary of $15.5 million, still figures to be the team’s starter in Week 1.
“Carson told me that all the coaching things are great, but some of the best things to develop a young quarterback are a veteran quarterback,” Keim said. “He learned that from Jon Kitna (who started over Palmer during Palmer’s rookie season in 2003), and maybe it wasn’t technical things. Maybe it was how to prepare off the field, how to study film.
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