USA TODAY International Edition
Cardinals’ Fitzgerald returning
PHOENIX – The gold jacket can wait a little while longer. So can his place up in the State Farm Stadium rafters as the newest member of the Cardinals’ Ring of Honor.
Larry Legend is coming back. After contemplating retirement for a third year in a row, wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald has decided to return for a 17th NFL season with the Cardinals.
Word officially came Wednesday morning through a news release by the team, and once it hit social media and every major news outlet in the country, you could hear about a million or more Fitzgerald fans start to celebrate.
Fitzgerald tweeted Wednesday morning: “This season was among the most fun of my career. The future is so bright for this team & I relish the opportunity to build with this talented young nucleus. Arizona is where I started and where I will finish. 2020!”
After the team’s last game of the season at Los Angeles against the Rams, he made it clear he had one of his most enjoyable seasons in recent memory.
“The atmosphere, the positivity, I think it’s a lot of different reasons, but it’s been a great year,” he said after the Cardinals finished 5- 10- 1. “For a five- win season, I can’t remember having as much joy in the process. Being around these coaches, my teammates, how they work every day, how serious they take football. It would’ve been easy for young guys who never experienced the NFL, when we weren’t going to make the playoffs in early December, to pack it in, and that wasn’t the case.”
The 2020 season will be Fitzgerald’s 17th with the Cardinals. In franchise history only quarterback Jim Hart ( 18) will have played more.
Fitzgerald will turn 37 before the start of the 2020 season, but he continues to be the heartbeat of the franchise despite having played with 21 different quarterbacks. This past season, working with prized rookie Kyler Murray, he led the Cardinals in receiving for the 13th time with 75 catches for 804 yards.
Fitzgerald has now led the team in receiving yards at age 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35 and 36.
Although he’s experienced only five winning seasons with the Cardinals, he holds every single receiving mark in the team’s record book and ranks second all time in the NFL behind Jerry Rice in career receptions ( 1,378) and receiving yards ( 17,083). He is No. 6 in career touchdown receptions ( 120).
In Week 17, Fitzgerald appeared in his 250th NFL game, becoming just the 13th player in league history – and the only wide receiver – to play in that many or more games with the same team.
Teammates and coaches alike had all been saying Fitzgerald seemed to be enjoying himself more this past season than he has in recent years and they felt he would be back.
Fitzgerald will enter the season with 243 consecutive games with at least one reception, the second- longest streak in history behind Rice ( 274).