TEMPE, Ariz. — For the last four years, Teddy Bridgewater’s words have been a lighthouse for new Arizona Cardinals quarterback Desmond Ridder, guiding his journey as a signal-caller regardless of where he’s been.
Ridder, who was traded to the Cardinals from the Atlanta Falcons on March 14, saw an interview of Bridgewater saying he was not prepared to go in for Drew Brees when the future Hall of Famer exited the New Orleans Saints’ Week 2 game in 2019.
“He got injured, and I wasn’t prepared and it humbled me,” Bridgewater said, per The Times-Picayune. “It taught me a valuable lesson. We always talk about staying ready, but I wasn’t ready in that moment.”
Ridder, then a 20-year-old quarterback at the University of Cincinnati, never forgot those words and implemented them during his first two NFL seasons: As a rookie, he replaced Marcus Mariota as the Atlanta Falcons starting quarterback for the last four games of 2022 and split time in 2023 with Taylor Heinicke after starting the first eight games.
He’ll continue to lean on them again this season when he competes to be Kyler Murray’s backup in Arizona.
“That kind of stuck with me, you know, even before I was in the league,” Ridder said. “And that’s just one thing that stuck with me, and I’ll always prepare as if I’m the starter.”
It’s a role that was especially important for the Cardinals last season since Murray was out for the start of the 2023 season rehabbing his right ACL. The team cut Colt McCoy between the last preseason game and Week 1. Arizona then traded for Joshua Dobbs to be the Day 1 starter until Murray could return. With Murray now healthy, Ridder and Clayton Tune will compete to back him up.
Arizona wanted Ridder because of his experience and playing style. General manager Monti Ossenfort made the move partly because Ridder is similar to Tune and Murray from a scheme approach. Ridder’s mobility, arm talent, ability to play fast and football IQ also jumped out to the second-year coach.
“When you look at our starter, the things that he can do, you’re always looking at, ‘OK, well if the backup goes in, how much do you have to change?'” Gannon said. “And with him and Clayton [Tune], we feel really good about not changing very much because of their skillset. So, that’s cool.”
With Arizona, Ridder gets a fresh start. At the NFL combine in February, new Falcons coach Raheem Morris didn’t sugarcoat his feelings toward Atlanta’s quarterback situation.
“If we had better quarterback play, I’m probably not standing here at this podium,” Morris said.
Ridder, who had 13 starts in 15 games, completed 249 passes for 2,836 yards with 12 interceptions and 12 touchdowns in 2023. He and Heinicke combined for a 41.9 quarterback rating. About two weeks after the combine, Ridder was traded to Arizona.
“Obviously that’s tough,” Ridder said of Morris’ comments. “But as a quarterback and as any team sports player, it’s not all on one person. So, the outside world and whoever it may be, can pin it all on one person, but it’s a team sport. I didn’t play 10 percent of those games very well, but I also wasn’t the only one out there.
“For me to be able to go out there and just learn from it, be able to go out there and be better from it, I think that’s what’s gonna help me in the long run in my career and my longevity. So, you can’t really control what other people say, but you can control how you respond and what you go do.”
Ridder has adopted a mindset common among backups: He looks at himself as the starting quarterback Monday through Saturday. It puts him in the right headspace to learn what’s necessary for the week, should he get that call to take the field.
“What you gotta learn is that all it takes is one play,” Ridder said. “Four to six seconds is the average length of a play, and that’s how quick you can become the starter again. So, you have to be ready.”
The Cardinals’ struggles without their starter magnified the need for a quality backup last season, but the necessity of having one was driven home to Gannon this offseason. Last season, the NFL saw its lowest scoring average across all teams since 2017 and the second-most quarterback starts in a season since the strike year of 1987.
“I mean, all positions are important, but I think especially that one because the guy doesn’t typically get a ton of reps, especially as the season gets rolling on, that position’s important,” Gannon said. “And I think the importance of that position on your roster has gone up, up, up the last couple years here.”
First, though, Ridder has to win the backup job — and he’s intimately familiar with his competition. Ridder said Tune is like a “little brother.” They’re friends, they’ve trained together and Ridder led Cincinnati to a win over Tune’s Houston Cougars in the 2021 American Athletic Conference championship game.
While the two will be vying for a spot on the Cardinals’ roster and possibly a uniform on game day should they make the 53-man roster, Ridder and Tune can rely on each other. Ridder will look to Tune to learn the offense and how to back up Murray, and Tune will look to Ridder for guidance on the nuances of being an NFL quarterback since Ridder has a season and 16 starts over Tune.
Ridder is acutely aware of his deficiencies and knows what needs to improve to outmaneuver Tune for the job.
“One thing I wanna improve is just going out there playing free,” Ridder said. “A lot of the times I felt like I was playing not to mess it up, not to screw it up. And so just to be able to go out there, play free, play loose, play within the system. And then there were a lot of good things that I did on film and then there were some bad things.
“It just happened to be that those bad things outweighed the good. There was a lot of the games where it was 90 percent good and 10 percent bad, and in those 10 percent, that just happened to be the determining factor of the game.”
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