Blaine Gabbert and Tom Savage, I owe you an apology

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in expecting Sunday’s matchup between Blaine Gabbert and Tom Savage to be terrible. But I was wrong, and I owe those guys an apology.

Savage did enough for the Texans to get his team the 31-21 win. And Gabbert was not the reason the Cardinals didn’t get it done against Houston. Both quarterbacks outplayed their reputations on Sunday, and they deserve credit for it.

The offensive line kept his pocket mostly clean, and Savage was actually able to make some big plays. That hasn’t exactly been a hallmark of his career.

Take as an example his third-quarter, 28-yard touchdown pass to DeAndre Hopkins. I’m going to say something about this pass that I have never said before about a ball that was thrown by Tom Savage. This was a dime.

He’s under pressure, but steps up in the pocket and puts the ball right where it needs to be for Hopkins to score.

D’Onta Foreman helped, too, with 65 yards on the ground and two rushing touchdowns. Unfortunately, he won’t be around to make things easier for Savage going forward. He tore his Achilles in Sunday’s game and is out for the rest of the season.

He did have a signature Tom Savage strip sack, but nobody’s perfect. He also didn’t let it affect him for the rest of the game.

“He really didn’t give in to that mentally,” Texans head coach O’Brien said. “I thought he came in back to the sideline and recovered and went on to play a good game.”

Savage showed promise with a clean pocket. He finished with 230 yards, two touchdowns, and one interception. If the Texans can keep him upright, he could be a serviceable fill in for the rest of the season while Deshaun Watson recovers from a torn ACL.

To be fair, most of the Cardinals’ roster played poorly. So it was a sliding scale. But Gabbert was absolutely not the reason the Cardinals fell short.

Gabbert got the start because Drew Stanton was out with a sprained knee. But Gabbert looked like a better option than Stanton with Carson Palmer out for the season with a broken arm. Gabbert finished with 257 yards, three touchdowns, and two interceptions.

The ageless Larry Fitzgerald was part of Gabbert’s success. Fitzgerald had nine catches for 91 yards and a touchdown, which was a beauty.

Rookie tight end Ricky Seals-Jones came up big for Gabbert and the Cardinals, too. All three of his receptions on the season came in this game. He got two of them in the end zone for scores.

Gabbert didn’t get any help from Adrian Peterson, who finished with 26 yards on 14 carries. And dropped balls plagued J.J. Nelson and John Brown. But even without any semblance of a run game and unreliable receivers, Gabbert still played well enough to earn the team’s confidence. He’ll get the start again for Arizona this week, Bruce Arians said on Monday.

General manager Steve Keim was impressed, also.

“I thought he looked poised in the pocket, especially when you consider the fact that … really we had to be one-dimensional because of our inability to run the football,” Keim said on his radio show on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM. “When you combine all those things with the drops, again, I thought he played very good and certainly is a guy that’s exciting moving forward.”

Neither Gabbert nor Savage is anyone’s long-term answer for any starting quarterback role. But I predicted they would be terrible, and they proved me wrong on Sunday.