Ladies and Gentlemen, the Arizona Cardinals

They can spend $40 million dollars on a running back, draft the best QB prospect in the draft, and open up a new spaceship/football stadium, but none of that is enough to change the undeniable fact that the Arizona Cardinals are an abysmal franchise.

To have the Chicago Bears, who ESPN and other national media outlets are already having sized for Super Bowl rings, on the ropes with 23-3 lead with less than 10 seconds remaining in the 3rd quarter, and somehow manage to blow the game, is downright inexcusable.

You can't ask anything more from Matt Leinart. You can't ask for anything more from the defense, which forced SIX Rex Grossman turnovers and kept the "high-powered" Bears offense out of the end zone.

What it comes down to is poor coaching. Why, on planet Earth, would any team with a 6-point lead late in the 4th quarter throw passes on 2nd and 3rd-and-12, when the opportunity is there to force the Bears to use all their timeouts? Sure, James likely wouldn't have gained any yardage, and the Bears still would've gotten the ball back with plenty of time to score the go-ahead touchdown, but you accomplish nothing when you stop the clock for the other team and allow them to conserve timeouts. Running the ball, even if for minimal gains, is the standard operating procedure in that scenario.

What would compel a special teams coach to neglect to inform his punter that he needs to kick the ball away from the dangerous Devin Hester, the Bears return man?

The way the Cardinals lost this game is a clear sign that the captain steering the ship is grossly incompetent. This is the second season in a row where the Cardinals have entered the regular season with enough talent on both sides of the ball to warrant lofty expectations, and this will be the second season in a row where, for some reason, the Cardinals will fail to live up to them.

Towards the end of the broadcast, after Neil Rackers missed what is, for him, a chip-shot field goal and Rex Grossman was taking a knee to run out the clock, one of the talking heads on ESPN mentioned that the Cardinals felt heading into the MNF game that they should've been 3-2, and now they'll feel like they should be 4-2. Guess what, Cardinals? You're 1-5, and you can go ahead and make vacation plans in early January.