Disregard Arizona's top-10 draft pick, anemic running game and sieve of an offensive line.

The "Same Old Cardinals" as we knew them are dead, a thing of the past.

Now if only the "Same Old Cardinals Fans" would go with them.

"I think that when you look at the last three seasons, particularly the last two seasons, our defense has performed at a very high level," Cardinals president Michael Bidwill said Monday. "Our offense seemed to struggle. We needed to focus on improving our offense, and I just didn't feel like where things stood that the course that we were on was the way to keep going."

Bidwill continued.

"So I felt like it was time to make a change. When you look at the last three seasons, we didn't have a winning season in any of those three seasons. Of the 48 games, we won 18, and only four of those games were on the road."

Pretty compelling reasons for a change to be made, right? The idea in the NFL is, after all, to win games, and the Whisenhunt-led Cardinals were clearly not doing that.

Even so there were -- and still are -- many who feel like Bidwill made a mistake, that canning the most successful coach in franchise history will set the team back.

You won't be able to do better than Whisenhunt.

Can't do better than a coach with a 45-51 record who has posted just two winning seasons in six tries? I certainly hope the Cardinals can, and at the very least they should try to do better.

I'm OK with the move if they have an actual plan in place.

Teams do not generally fire coaches and soon after come to the realization that they now have to replace him. Bidwill said he had been thinking about making this move for a while, so it stands to reason he not only had a list of candidates he wanted to speak with, but a good idea about whether or not they would be interested in the job.

Whisenhunt was not the problem, this won't help.

This is debatable, as the coach had nothing to do with the injuries that besieged his team but had everything to do with the players on the roster. Was Whisenhunt the coach sabotaged by Whisenhunt the talent evaluator? Perhaps, but at the end of the day they are the same person, and the latter certainly had to go.

By making the move, Bidwill took another step toward proving he is not running a "cheap" organization. Many theorized the Cardinals would keep Whisenhunt around because they did not want to pay both him and a new coach next season, which is something that would have fit right along with how the franchise used to be run.

But that is not the case anymore.

"I think when you look back at the opportunity that we had to get to the Super Bowl, that is something that I want to get back to," Bidwill said. "I want to get back to winning football. It is a lot more fun to be winning football games and have all that excitement around this organization."

That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

Yet, there is a contingent of folks who still believe either believe the Cardinals can't be successful, don't don't know how to be successful or don't want to be successful.

Those folks can't seem to let go of what the Cardinals once were. Bidwill has for the most part lived up to the promise he made back in the day that a new stadium would lead to a new Arizona Cardinals franchise, and now simply being mediocre or competitive is not enough.

The Cardinals weren't even that of late.

The Cardinals demand better, and they weren't getting it.

And whether they give the job to Andy Reid, Ray Horton, Mike McCoy or any one of the candidates available, all that matters is they decided the status quo, which was a 5-11 season that included a nine-game losing streak, was not acceptable. So they made a change.

It's the type of thing a team that cares about winning first would do.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are your Arizona Cardinals.