Mike LaFleur, the Cardinals Coach Who Finally Got the Play Sheet Back

Mike LaFleur

Photo: Thomson200 / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1987 Mount Pleasant
Occupation	Footballer

The most revealing thing Mike LaFleur said on the day the Arizona Cardinals introduced him was not about culture or toughness. It was about a sheet of paper. He confirmed he would call the offensive plays himself, something he had not done since leaving the Jets, and summed up the years in between in three words: “I missed it.” His first season in charge hangs on that admission. He has spent most of his career inside two of the most copied offensive systems in the NFL, Kyle Shanahan’s and Sean McVay’s, and the one time the play sheet was his, in New York, the job ended with both sides agreeing to part ways. Arizona has bet five years that the second attempt goes differently.

Football in the LaFleur family is hard to separate from the man. He grew up in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, the younger brother of Matt LaFleur, now the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. He was the starting quarterback at Mount Pleasant High School and went on to Elmhurst College outside Chicago, where he played quarterback for three seasons before moving to safety as a senior and starting all ten games on defense. He left as a team captain and a three-time letter winner.

The coaching path started at the bottom. LaFleur, born on March 3, 1987, was 22 when he stayed on at Elmhurst as an offensive assistant in 2009, spent three seasons at Saint Joseph’s College in Indiana, first coaching quarterbacks and then running the offense, and became offensive coordinator at Davidson in 2013. The break came in 2014, when the Cleveland Browns took him on as an offensive intern under coordinator Kyle Shanahan. He followed Shanahan to Atlanta as an offensive assistant for the 2015 and 2016 seasons, then to San Francisco when Shanahan became the 49ers head coach in 2017, as passing game coordinator and, for two of those years, wide receivers coach. The 49ers reached the Super Bowl after the 2019 season, and the club extended his contract before the game.

New York was the first time the offense belonged to him. Robert Saleh, the 49ers defensive coordinator, took the Jets head coaching job in 2021 and brought LaFleur along as offensive coordinator and play-caller. The first season, built around rookie quarterback Zach Wilson, finished 4-13. The second started 7-4 and then came apart: six straight defeats, no touchdown in the last three of them, a 7-10 record and a twelfth consecutive season without the playoffs, the longest such run in the league. On January 11, 2023, the Jets and LaFleur agreed to part ways.

Sixteen days later he was in Los Angeles as McVay’s offensive coordinator, a job with one condition that shapes how he is judged now: McVay called the plays. Over LaFleur’s three seasons the Rams ranked fifth in the NFL in passing yards, first downs and touchdowns and sixth in yards and points per game, according to the Cardinals. The 2025 team went 12-5, was the only one in the league to score more than 500 points, won playoff games at Carolina and, in overtime, at Chicago, and lost the NFC Championship Game in Seattle, 31-27.

That résumé is exactly what makes him hard to read. Its best numbers came from plays someone else chose, inside a system someone else designed, executed by Matthew Stafford and Puka Nacua. The only NFL offense LaFleur has called himself is the one that went three straight games without a touchdown in New York, with a young quarterback who never settled. A fair reading allows that the Jets roster, and Wilson, were not his choices. It also has to allow that Arizona hired the McVay pedigree with no evidence yet that it travels when McVay is not the one speaking into the headset.

The Cardinals hired him on February 1, 2026, on a five-year contract, to replace Jonathan Gannon, who had been fired after going 15-36 across three seasons and finishing 2025 at 3-14. Owner Michael Bidwill called him the clear winner among the 14 candidates the team interviewed in a 27-day search. At his introduction LaFleur recalled the days the Rams spent in Arizona after wildfires moved their playoff game to State Farm Stadium, and what he told his wife then: “I’m going to be the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals someday. It just felt right.” He also turned to Bidwill with a line that sounded half like a joke: “I’m not saying you got it right. I hope you got it right.”

The rebuild that followed was fast and not gentle. The Cardinals released Kyler Murray in March after seven seasons and handed the offense to Jacoby Brissett on a reworked one-year deal. They drafted Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love third overall. And in October, after Marvin Harrison Jr., the fourth overall pick of 2024, had caught five passes for 85 yards in the new offense and been made inactive for a home loss to Detroit, they traded him to the Houston Texans for 2027 second- and seventh-round picks, sending a sixth-rounder with him. General manager Monti Ossenfort said the team had to do what was best for the football team. For a first-year coach it was an expensive statement of priorities.

The results so far are uneven. LaFleur’s first win as a head coach came in Week 1, 26-14 at the Los Angeles Chargers, an upset ESPN called the biggest of the opening weekend. Four straight defeats followed, three of them with 36 or more points allowed. Then, on October 18, he went back to SoFi Stadium and beat McVay’s Rams 18-16 without scoring a touchdown: Chad Ryland kicked six field goals, the last from 43 yards as time expired, after Arizona had reached the red zone five times without finding the end zone. “Deep down, I thought we were going to win the game when we had 51 seconds,” LaFleur said afterwards, and he singled out those red-zone trips as something he would evaluate.

He married his wife, Lauren, in July 2010, and the couple have two children; his parents and his brother’s family were in the room the day Arizona presented him.

The Cardinals are 2-4, with both wins at SoFi. The Denver Broncos visit State Farm Stadium on October 25, McVay’s Rams come to Arizona later in the season, and so do the New York Jets. “Every year is a blank slate,” LaFleur said in February. The difference this time is that the pencil is his.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, Los Angeles Rams, Arizona Cardinals, Sean McVay, New York Jets, Matt LaFleur, Mike LaFleur