Keim’s on-the-fly rebuild is working for Cardinals
It was looking grim for Arizona Cardinals general manager Steve Keim.
He had a three-win team, no head coach, an under-performing quarterback and holes all over the roster. There was no one else to blame. It all happened on his watch.
So how did he respond?
“It’s pretty simple,” he said in a phone interview with the Arizona Republic on Friday.
“It’s like my favorite movie, ‘Shawshank Redemption’ ... ‘Get busy living or get busy dying.’ You’ve got a choice, man. It’s like, ‘Let’s go.’”
Keim put together an unorthodox onthe-fly rebuild that has the franchise riding a three-game win streak with an outside shot at making the playoffs.
It’s too soon to evaluate the season. There’s plenty of time for things to go bad, and the next four games against New Orleans, San Francisco and Tampa Bay (with three on the road), could end the good vibes in a hurry.
But for now, Keim’s decisions to hire a failed college coach and draft a sawedoff quarterback are being vindicated against an NFL establishment that said he was writing his own pink slip.
The real question is how did he do it? How did he block out the noise and ignore critics? (I’ve been as hard on him as anyone over the last three seasons, but I’ve said repeatedly that the Kliff Kingsbury hire had a chance to work and that Kyler Murray was the obvious choice with the top pick in the draft.)
“If you’re not having success,” Keim said, “people are gonna be critical. And the bottom line is, the reason I’m probably able to block it out is because when we’re not having success, nobody’s harder on me than me. I’m extremely demanding of myself and have high expectations. I always have. … (Besides) when I haven’t trusted my instincts and sort of forced a decision or sort of justified doing something that I didn’t believe in, it’s always come back to haunt me.”
He acknowledged that it’s not easy. “It’s hard,” he said. “It really is. … Look at how many people didn’t believe in the Josh Rosen-for-Kyler Murray thing. Whether you believe in it or not, that’s what I believed in. That’s what I saw. We knew that we had to make a game-changing decision from an organizational standpoint. And that’s why we went with Kyler.”
It was similar with the decision to hire Kingsbury.
“Sometimes, to be successful, you have to be willing to step outside of the box and not be afraid,” Keim said.
“The things about Kliff that I’ve always admired are his creativity and his play calling. Getting to know him as a person over the years, his humility, the way he’s carried himself, his demeanor, it always impressed me.
“Years ago, when I went to see Patrick Mahomes with Bruce Arians, just getting to spend time with (Kliff), I thought to myself, ‘Someday this guy’s gonna be a good NFL football coach.’
“Just the way he carried himself and the way he talked about the players and the way they responded to his demeanor, his swag. I think it’s paying off. I think he’s gonna be a heck of a coach in our league.”
Keim didn’t make his decisions alone.
“I’m a huge believer in learning from others,” he said, “particularly people you admire. Whether it’s my old boss Rod Graves or Michael Bidwill or my colleagues around the league who I admire.
“I try to pick their brains, but at the same time, you have to have certain instincts, and you have to have belief and you have to have conviction. That’s half the battle. Because when you sit down on the job, nobody gives you a manual that says, ‘Here’s How You Become a GM.’ I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that you have to learn on the move. And the only way you’re going to get better or learn is from certain mistakes. I’m a huge believer in that, as well.
“Sometimes the best learning lessons are from the mistakes you’ve made. It’s the only way you can take an honest look and be real with yourself and say, ‘Listen, I’ve got to get better.’” It takes more than that, though. That’s the difference between success and failure is having a plan, Keim said.
Guys who can actually turn it around are “the ones who have the ability to say, ‘OK, I screwed up, but what’s the answer?’” he said. “Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. This job and this business, it can be a real inexact science.”
But it all comes back to assuredness and confidence — and taking advice from pop culture, whether that’s “Shawshank Redemption” or Frank Sinatra.
“At the end of the day,” Keim said, “hopefully, it’s years from now, when you walk away from this business, hopefully, you’re able to look in the mirror and say, ‘I did it my way. I made the decisions based on what I believe in.’”