The final episode of HBO’s and NFL Films’ “Hard Knocks – In Season with the Arizona Cardinals” was broadcast Wednesday night, and as epic as the chronicling of the last week of J.J. Watt’s career was, what everyone also wanted to see was how the program would tell the end of coach Kliff Kingsbury’s tenure.
“Hard Knocks” didn’t disappoint, even though the series didn’t always pull back the curtains as much as fans were hoping to see.
Before he was fired on Monday morning by team owner Michael Bidwill, the cameras caught Kingsbury addressing the team in the locker room at Levi’s Stadium following the Cardinals’ 38-13 loss to the 49ers, dropping them to 4-13 on the season.
“I’m disappointed for y’all, for y’all, because I know what you deserve,” Kingsbury told his players. “It just didn’t work this year, but it will! This year happened for us, not to us, and we’re going to learn from it and be better moving forward, I promise y’all.
“But I cannot tell you how much it meant to me how y’all (expletive) worked and showed up each and every week, man. It meant everything to me, so thank y’all.”
At the end of the show, following passages from Bidwill’s Monday news conference announcing the dismissal of Kingsbury and the resignation of General Manager Steve Keim, “Hard Knocks” showed a brief clip of Kingsbury addressing some of his players yet again in the auditorium at the team’s Tempe training facility.
He tells them what most of them…
