The Arizona Cardinals paid a heavy price for running back Emari Demercado’s fourth-quarter fumble Sunday against the Tennessee Titans, as his gaffe short of the goal line was one of several bizarre moments that led to the Titans storming back and upsetting Arizona.
Now his head coach is paying a price as well.
Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon is being fined $100,000 by the team for an altercation with Demercado following the play on the sideline. As the running back was being consoled by left tackle Paris Johnson, Gannon got in Demercado’s ear, and then appeared to strike the running back’s chest or right arm when he was walking away.
Here is the incident in question:
Gannon told the media on Monday that he had apologized to both Demercado and the team.
“I woke up this morning and didn’t feel great about it, honestly,” Gannon said.
“I just told them, I kind of let the moment of what happened get the better of me there,” Gannon added. “Obviously, I try to be emotionally stable and calm because my job is to solve problems during a game and lead the charge on that. So, it’s not really who I am, who I want to be, and I told the guys that today.
“So, it’s a mistake by me, and it’s just like everybody in there, everybody made some type of mistake yesterday, which culminates to why we didn’t win the game. We can’t let it happen moving forward.”
Gannon is the first head coach to be fined for such an incident since Bruce Arians in 2022. The former Cardinals head coach, then with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was fined $50,000 for striking Buccaneers safety Andrew Adams in the helmet during a Wild Card Game against Philadelphia.
In that incident, Arians came onto the field after Tampa Bay had recovered a fumble, and hit Adams on the helmet as the Tampa Bay safety was pulling players off a pile.
“No, I’ve seen enough dumb [things]. You can’t pull guys out of a pile. We just got a big play, great field position, and he’s trying to pull a guy out of a pile,” Arians said in a press conference. “And I was trying to knock him off that guy so he didn’t get a penalty.”
