Arizona Cardinals wide receivers Marquise Brown and Rondale Moore, both listed as questionable, are expected to play Sunday against the Carolina Panthers, a source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter on Saturday night.
Brown and Moore, who have been nursing hamstring injuries, will give the Cardinals another layer of skill down the field. This will be Moore’s season debut for Arizona, which sits at 1-2 after a 20-12 loss last week to the Los Angeles Rams.
Moore, 22, a 2021 second-round draft pick out of Purdue, had 54 catches last season for 435 yards and a touchdown for the Cardinals.
Brown is in his first season with Arizona after three with the Baltimore Ravens. A 2019 first-round draft pick out of Oklahoma, Brown, 25, has 24 catches this season for 251 yards and a score. In his final season with the Ravens, he finished with 91 catches, 1,008 yards and six touchdowns.
The Cardinals on Sunday will try to shake some first-quarter woes that have plagued the offense. And they go well beyond not being able to score a point in the combined 45 minutes of game time, something 31 other teams have done.
Arizona is last in the NFL in yards margin and first downs in the first quarter. The Cardinals are second-to-last in time of possession, yards per game and rushing yards per game in the first 15 minutes.
For a fourth consecutive week, the Cardinals spent the week working on getting off to quicker start. Their inability to do so has led coach Kliff Kingsbury to rethink his approach to everything.
“I think there’s a couple different approaches,” he said. “One is to ignore it like it didn’t happen and after you’ve over-talked it, but we’ve definitely addressed it. We’ve talked through it, and we know that to be the team we want to be, we’ve got to start faster.
“Getting behind the teams we’ve gotten behind in the first three weeks at the amount that it’s happened, it’s not sustainable to win many games in this league.”