If the Arizona Cardinals do as well against their schedule in 2025 as they did in unveiling the schedule, then the NFL team will make its second playoff appearance in 10 seasons.
The Cardinals generated a buzz among the NFL and its fans on Wednesday night with how they announced their schedule for the 2025 season: Arizona linebacker Mack Wilson rapped a song about it.
A former high school standout at Carver-Montgomery who played three seasons at Alabama, Wilson wrote the lyrics for “18 Bars.”
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“They reached out for me from the Cardinals, obviously,” Wilson said during an appearance on NFL Network’s “Good Morning Football,” “and was just like, ‘What do you think about doing a song for our schedule release?’ And I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, for real, but I accepted it. I didn’t know how much hard work was going to go into this, but it was a dope experience.
“They was able to find me because Jesse Luketa and Zach Paschal, who I was doing music with last year, my little Third-and-Go group, we was making a lot of songs last year bumping in the locker room where the guys could hear it, and the guys was liking our music, so we kind of just stayed with it and was making music after every home game, if we had time, so that’s kind of like how it came about.”
The schedule song can be found on Apple Music and Spotify, as can Third-and-Go’s five-song album “Its Us.”
Wilson performs under the name “Rocketship.”
“It was kind of like a part of my journey, if that makes sense,” Wilson said of the nickname he hung on himself when he joined the Cardinals as an NFL free agent last offseason. “I was like: What better way would it be for me to start calling myself Rocketship because I felt like it was time for me to take off, like as far as my career and things? It was something I came up with, and all my boys was bashing me about it at first. But now the whole world calls me that a year later.”
Arizona’s only winning season since 2015 came in 2021. The Cardinals went 8-9 in 2024. Wilson thinks Arizona can make some noise in the NFC West this season.
“I feel like it’s a lot of talent in the NFC West,” Wilson said. “You got Sam Darnold over there at Seattle, you got the 49ers, you got the Rams, who just added Davante Adams. I feel like we got some ballers over there. As far as us, the Cardinals, we made a lot of additions on the defensive side, we got our offense back, so I feel like it’s some balling going on definitely, and we’re just going to try our best to be on those of teams at the top.”
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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on X at@AMarkG1.