Posted by So it took me a couple of days to get over the fact that Arizona hired a mediocre college coach to take over the Cardinals head coaching duties. He has also come out and stated that he wants to take Kyler Murray number 1 overall in the upcoming draft when they just drafted Josh Rosen the previous season. I was completely unsure if he would make anymore mistakes during his coaching tree, but I feel the move the for Vance Joseph as the defensive coordinator might be one that could help his salvage some face in his first season in charge. Joseph has had an interesting ride to getting to this point so lets look at his previous stints and see how he has done overall.
Coming out of the University of Colorado as a player, he was not one of the more highly touted players and went undrafted in the 1995 draft as he was a backup quarterback converted to defensive back. He played two seasons in the NFL but was not brought back after his stint in Indianapolis. He then moved into coaching where he joined his alma mater as a graduate assistant. He was then promoted to secondary coach while at Colorado before making a move to test his skills at Wyoming. His defense did manage to secure 8 interceptions that season, but he abruptly moved back to Colorado the next season. This is where the story gets a little interesting.
While coaching at Colorado, there were accusations of sexual assault from two female trainers working with Joseph. Neither would press charges or speak to the police so those charges were eventually dropped, but this incident was part of a massive internal investigation involving multiple CU football players and multiple women. Joseph was also accused of sexual harassment as allegedly he had sexual intercourse with another trainer. No worries this will come up later.
Joseph left to be the defensive back coordinator at Bowling Green for one season before making the leap to the NFL level with the San Francisco 49ers. From there he bounced around from there to Houston and to Cincinnati before landing a defensive coordinator position with the Miami Dolphins. Just one season later, John Elway calls up asking if he would like to join the Denver Broncos organization as the head coach. After a discussion about what happened at Colorado where he denied the sexual assault but was embarrassed by the sexual harassment claims. I am unsure if that is an admission of guilt and I do not want to draw conclusions, but I will let you decide for yourself.
I do think it is slightly unfair to give Vance Joseph the blame for the 5-11 season in where Trevor Simeon was the best starting option at quarterback, Brock Osweiller, who had just totally flopped in Houston, and Paxton Lynch, who seems to be a bust at this point. The 2018 season, though, didn’t fair much better. Case Keenum only managed 18 tds and 15 ints over the course of the season the team to a 6-10 record. A small improvement but not enough for Elway to bring him back for the third season in charge.
Soon after Kliff Kingsbury was hired as the Cardinals head coach, Vance Joseph joined the college coach in an attempt to turn around this struggling franchise. We will have to sit back and see if either man can make it one season in such a dysfunctional situation.
If you had asked me the day it happened if this was a good hire, I would have said no based off of his recent success, or lack there of. But looking at this with a bit of time, Kingsbury needs as much experience in his coordinator spots as possible, and Vance Joseph has been doing this for a decade and a half now. I don’t think this is the hire everyone wanted, but it could be the hire that helps Kingsbury save his job past year one. I do plan on doing an in-depth analysis on Kingsbury here in the coming days, but I wanted to get to see who his coordinators are prior to in order to see if I believe he is on the right track, or the Cardinals made a serious mistake.
Ya Boy TO Sports 