Twenty-seven of the 32 homegrown players on Arizona’s 2025 roster arrived in the last three drafts. Every Cardinals draft before 2023, going back through the entire Steve Keim era and past it, contributes five. That is not a rebuild in the usual sense of the word, where a front office trades down, stockpiles picks, and lets a young core develop. It is closer to a demolition, and the thing worth understanding is that the picks Arizona made on the way down were not obviously bad ones.
The reputation says otherwise. Keim’s decade in Arizona is remembered as a slow slide from a mid-decade contender to a front office that could not stop missing, and the 2019 and 2022 classes get cited as the proof. The record is more uncomfortable than that. Across the eleven complete draft classes from 2012 through 2022, Arizona converted 41 of 81 picks into 500-snap contributors, a rate of 50.6 percent against a league mark of 57.3. That is below average. It is not a disaster. On the first two days of the draft, where the real capital is spent, the Cardinals were within a point and a half of everyone else.
So the interesting question is not why Arizona drafted badly. It is why a decade of roughly ordinary drafting left almost nothing standing.
The picks were not the problem
Start with the part of the draft that decides seasons. From 2012 through 2022 Arizona made 31 selections in the first three rounds and got 25 players who produced at least one 500-snap season. That is 80.6 percent against a league rate of 82.0 percent across the same window. On the two days when front offices are spending premium capital, the Cardinals were essentially indistinguishable from the field.
The rounds underneath that headline hold up too. Arizona went 9 for 10 in the first round (90 percent, against a league rate of 94) and 8 for 9 in the second (88.9 percent, against 83.1). Kyler Murray, first overall in 2019, and Budda Baker, the 36th pick in 2017, are two of those hits, and both are still in the building. The second round is a genuine strength, nearly six points clear of the league. The third round sits at 66.7 percent (8 of 12) against 71.0. None of those gaps is large enough to build an indictment on. A front office that hits at those rates on Day 1 and Day 2 for eleven straight years should have a roster full of its own players by the end of it.
The fourth round is the one that should have been the foundation. Arizona hit on 9 of 12 fourth-round picks, 75 percent against a league rate of 62. That is a thirteen-point edge in the round where good teams find starters on cheap contracts and hold them through a second deal. Arizona built the surplus and then did not keep it, which is the whole story in one round.
Where the drafts actually leaked
If the top of the draft was fine, the bottom was not, and the failure has a specific shape. Across the same eleven classes Arizona made 13 seventh-round picks and hit on none of them. Zero for thirteen. At the league’s seventh-round rate of 23.8 percent, that block of picks should have produced roughly three contributors.
The honest read on that number is that 13 picks is a small sample and a zero in a small sample is partly luck. Late-round drafting is close to a coin flip for everyone, and coin flips run cold. What makes it more than noise is the pattern above it. Rounds five through seven together produced 7 hits on 38 picks, 18.4 percent against a league rate of 33.5. Day 3 as a whole came in at 32.0 percent against 41.0. Arizona was fifteen points behind the league on its cheapest picks over more than a decade, and that gap is too wide and too sustained to write off as variance.
The result is a roster-building problem that compounds quietly. Day 3 is where depth comes from, and depth is what lets a team survive the seasons when the top of the roster gets expensive. Arizona spent eleven years drafting well enough at the top and poorly enough at the bottom that there was never a full roster of homegrown players to protect.
The first three drafts, and the seven after
Keim’s tenure is usually described as a decline, and here the data agrees emphatically. His first three drafts, 2013 through 2015, produced 16 hits on 23 picks: 69.6 percent against a league rate of 56.3. That is a thirteen-point edge, and it is roughly what a front office looks like when it is genuinely good at this. D.J. Humphries came out of the 2015 first round at pick 24. Deone Bucannon came out of 2014 at pick 27. The 2014 and 2015 classes are the best Arizona drafted in the window, both at 71.4 percent, 5 hits on 7 picks.
The seven drafts that followed produced 21 hits on 51 picks: 41.2 percent against a league rate of 58.4. The edge became a seventeen-point deficit. Across the same span the league baseline moved about two points, so the swing is not the sport changing around him. It is a 28-point collapse against a stable comparison, and it starts almost exactly where the 2016 class does. Robert Nkemdiche, the 2016 first-rounder at pick 29, never cleared the threshold: 444 snaps in his best season and 1,069 across 38 career games.
Keim’s full record lands at 50.0 percent, 37 hits on 74 picks, against a league rate of 57.7. The career number reads like mild underperformance. The two halves that produce it do not resemble each other at all.
What ten drafts left behind
Here is where the piece stops being about drafting. Of the 74 picks Keim made across ten drafts, four are on the 2025 roster: Budda Baker from the 2017 second round, Kyler Murray at first overall in 2019, Zaven Collins from the 2021 first round, and Trey McBride from the 2022 second. That is 5.4 percent of everything he drafted. Narrow it to the picks that actually hit and it barely moves: 4 of his 37 hits remain, 10.8 percent.
Measured across the full 2012 through 2022 window, Arizona kept 4 of 81 picks, 4.9 percent. When this series covered the Raiders, three GM firings in five years had left Las Vegas keeping 5 of 88 picks from the same window, 5.7 percent, and that was the lowest figure the series had published. Arizona is now under it. Of the teams covered so far, no front office has less to show for its own draft board.
The window is why this shows up here and not elsewhere. Josh Dubow’s AP retention rankings in September 2025 measured the 2021 through 2024 classes against a binary roster-or-IR test, which is a reasonable way to ask who is holding onto young players. It is not built to catch what happened in Arizona, because the classes that emptied out are mostly older than 2021 and the players who left were not marginal roster bodies. They cleared 500 snaps and then went somewhere else. Running the same question across eleven complete classes with a snap-level bar is what surfaces a 4.9 percent survival rate that a four-year binary snapshot cannot see. The full comparison is documented at /methodology.
The rest of the roster shows what filled the hole. Arizona’s 86-man roster in 2025 breaks down to 32 homegrown players (37.2 percent), 27 drafted by other teams (31.4 percent), and 27 who went undrafted (31.4 percent). Nearly two-thirds of the roster came from somewhere other than the Cardinals’ own draft board, and the veterans in that group are doing real work: James Conner, Josh Sweat, Dalvin Tomlinson, Jacoby Brissett, and Baron Browning were all drafted elsewhere. A front office that hits at 80.6 percent on Day 1 and Day 2 for a decade should not need to buy that much of its roster on the open market.
What makes Arizona different from Las Vegas is that the Raiders’ attrition tracked visible chaos. Arizona’s does not, quite. Keim was in the building for a full decade. The picks landed at close to a league-average rate on Day 1 and Day 2. And the roster still emptied out, which points less at the scouting department and more at everything downstream of it: second-contract decisions, cap sequencing, coaching turnover, and the churn that follows a team that stopped winning.
The teardown, in three classes
Monti Ossenfort took over the draft in 2023, and the composition of the current roster is the clearest evidence of what he inherited. Of the 32 homegrown players on the 86-man 2025 roster, 27 come from his three classes: 8 from 2023, 12 from 2024, and 7 from 2025. Marvin Harrison Jr. at pick 4 in 2024, Walter Nolen at 16 in 2025, and Will Johnson in the second round in 2025 are the premium capital. The other 24 are the roster around them.
The shape of that group is defensive and young. Twenty of the 32 homegrown players are on defense (62.5 percent), and the secondary alone accounts for 10. Nine of those 10 defensive backs came in the last three drafts. Arizona has rebuilt an entire position group from scratch in three years, which is a reasonable thing to do when the group you inherited has already left.
None of this can be graded yet. The 2023 through 2025 classes fall inside the three-year window this series treats as incomplete, so Ossenfort has no measured hit rate and will not have one for a while. What can be read is the spending shape, and it says the front office concluded the roster was not worth preserving. That is a defensible conclusion when four of the previous decade’s 74 picks are the only ones you kept.
The counterpoint
The phrase doing the most work in this piece is “drafted fine,” and the 500-snap threshold is what lets it stand. At the top of the draft that bar measures opportunity as much as quality. Josh Rosen, the tenth pick in 2018, counts as a hit here: he cleared 781 snaps in his best season. He also played 24 games across five seasons and 1,004 career snaps total, which is not the career anyone had in mind at pick 10. Jonathan Cooper, seventh overall in 2013, counts too, on 888 snaps in his best year and 2,226 across 46 games. High picks play because they were high picks. Two of Arizona’s nine first-round hits are hits in the way a participation record is a record, and a first-round rate of 90 percent that includes both of them is not describing what fans watched.
That cuts in a specific direction rather than simply weakening the finding. If the top-of-draft hit rate is generous, then Arizona drafted somewhat worse than “roughly average,” and the retention number is measuring real failure alongside real churn. Retention has its own limitation: it cannot tell a pick the team chose to let walk from a pick that was never worth keeping, and it counts a player traded for value the same as a player cut. But those two limitations do not cancel. They point the same way, which is that the gap between 41 hits and 4 survivors is not an artifact of definitions.
What to watch
Arizona is the cleanest illustration in this series of a distinction the draft-grade industry keeps collapsing. Hitting on a pick and keeping a player are separate skills, and a front office can do the first one at a league-average rate for eleven years and still hand its successor an empty building. Keim’s picks were not the reason his tenure ended. The four names still on the roster are.
The next reading comes in 2027 and 2028, when the 2023 and 2024 classes reach their second-contract decisions and Ossenfort’s drafts stop being unfalsifiable. Twelve players from a single 2024 class is a lot of roster to have built at once, and it is also a lot of roster to have to re-sign at once. Whether Arizona keeps that group will say more about the franchise than any hit rate it posts.