CINCINNATI – David Johnson isn’t sure when it happened or how it happened. But at some point in the first half of the Cardinals’ 26-23 victory over the Bengals here on Sunday, something happened to his back.

It locked up on him and it came and went as the afternoon progressed.

“It’s good. I just need to get a good rest day tomorrow,” Johnson said after rushing for 91 yards on 17 carries and catching three passes for 65 yards, including a key 24-yard reception down the left sideline on Arizona’s game-winning drive.

Johnson said he’s never dealt with any back issues before and added that he hopes it turns out to be nothing. He likely will get checked out more thoroughly on Monday, get some extra rest, and test things out when the Cardinals resume practice on Wednesday in preparation for Sunday’s home game against the Falcons.

“He powered through it and that won us the game – that big catch down the sideline,” coach Kliff Kingsbury said.

Johnson swears he doesn’t know what exactly may have caused his back to lock up, adding, “It just randomly did. I’ll have to try to figure out what happened. … It is tough, but I just tried to grind through it, help out the team as much as I could.”

Johnson accounted for 156 yards from scrimmage as the Cardinals rushed for a season-high 266 yards.

“I think the biggest thing was we just told ourselves we were going to run the ball down their throats,” Johnson said.

The double lateral

Kingsbury got a little tricky late in the second quarter.

On first-and-10 at the Bengals’ 37, Kyler Murray took a shotgun snap and threw the ball to Larry Fitzgerald.

No surprises there.

Fitzgerald, however, caught the ball and threw it back. (Technically, it was two laterals.)

Murray headed upfield, and it looked like he had room down the sideline, but a Cincinnati defender tripped him up for just a 5-yard gain.

“I thought he should have scored,” Kingsbury said. “He’s got to pick his knees up.”

Fitzgerald was hoping for the same thing, even if there was a complication.

“It was a play we’ve worked on for a little bit. I was hoping to be able to throw a touchdown on that,” he said. “But Carlos Dunlap doesn’t rush you in practice. I don’t like that. A 6-foot-7, 290-pound guy bearing down on you? I got out of Dodge as quick as possible, so the throw wasn’t as good as it could have been.

“But Kyler’s got to pick his feet up, man. If he makes one guy miss, he could have done something with it.”

Murray took it all in stride (so to speak) when he heard what Kingsbury and Fitzgerald had to say about the play.

“Lift my feet?” he said. “That’s tough. It is what it is.”

No I-N-T in 'team'

The Cardinals did enough on defense to win, but an interception might have helped. They still don’t have one this year.

It’s not necessarily a new problem.

The Cardinals defense didn’t come up with a pick in eight of their final nine games last season. That makes 13 of 14 regular-season games without one.

The last Arizona interception came from David Amerson, who picked off Russell Wilson in the 2018 season finale, a 27-24 loss to Seattle.

Be like Larry

Longtime Bengals wide receiver A.J. Green has become the subject of trade rumors in recent days, but the 31-year-old said he wants to be like his good friend, the Cardinals’ Fitzgerald, and stay with the team that drafted him.

“I always looked at Larry and his situation and how he handled things and wanted to model my game like his," Green, whose contract expires after this season, told Paul Dehner Jr. of The Athletic. “Never in the media, always in the media for positive things. That’s the biggest thing for me is just watching him. I watch him from a distance and how he carries himself on the field.”

Fitzgerald is in his 16th season with the Cardinals, and Green, now in is ninth season with Cincinnati, said he’d like to duplicate the same time of run with the Bengals.

"Yeah, you always want that," said Green, who missed his fifth straight game on Sunday because of a foot injury. “Nobody will ever value you more than the guys that drafted you. You want to leave a legacy. For him, he is the Arizona Cardinals’ legend. He can do anything he wants in the state of Arizona and people are going to stay behind him.

"It's so hard now, you see everybody that's not going well where they want a trade. I think Larry did it the right way. That's why he's a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer.”

Mr. Cooper’s return

In his first game back with the Cardinals after being released by Cincinnati, wide receiver Pharoh Cooper helped beat his most recent team with a strong game on special teams and helping out in the passing side of things as well.

Cooper caught two passes for 33 yards, including a 28-yard diving reception near the end of the third quarter that helped set up Zane Gonzalez’s third field goal of the game to take a 16-9 lead. He also returned two kickoffs for 52 yards, averaged 12 yards on a pair pf punt returns and had a 30 plus-yard return shortened significantly because of a penalty.

The Cardinals re-signed him last Monday following an ankle injury to Christian Kirk.

“To be able to have a guy that you can pick up and knows your system and he can come in and contribute right away, Coop is just an ultimate professional, man,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s been gone for over a month and (we) threw him in there first day and he knew exactly what he was doing. He’s just a smart guy and obviously he helped us out a lot.”

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Beyond the Gridiron: The Mountain — Episode 4