The NFL, perhaps more than any other professional sports league, is built by its little moments — the numerous individual tiles inside the mosaic of 60 minutes of Sunday football.

The little moment that might have stood out the brightest from the Arizona Cardinals’ 26-14 upset win over the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday wasn’t necessarily Jeremiyah Love’s or Trey McBride’s first touchdowns of the year.

It might not have even been the sight of new head coach Mike LaFleur, fighting off emotion on the sideline while calling for victory formation, as he became the first non-interim Cardinals coach to win his first game since Don Coryell did so in 1973.

It was a moment following a poor play in the fourth quarter. With under five minutes to play, a third-and-short pass play saw QB Jacoby Brissett run out of both time and room, forcing him out of bounds behind the line of scrimmage.

As Brissett walked off the field, LaFleur — animatedly — took responsibility, offering a “my bad” to his quarterback.

It wasn’t for the benefit of the media, to whom LaFleur later also stated his disdain for his own play call in that moment. It was for his field general — for the man whose responsibility it is to execute LaFleur’s plan.

And it stood for something the Cardinals haven’t seen from their staff in some time: not only a sense of more tangible personal accountability, but a willingness to learn, adapt and deviate from their path when a play or gameplan doesn’t work as intended.

Mike LaFleur showing accountability, flexibility early

LaFleur went back to that very play call during his Monday media session. He called it “horrendous.”

And despite both the win and the 26-point performance, LaFleur wasn’t satisfied with the fact Arizona settled for field goals five times. Three times did they stall out in the Red Zone.

“Wasn’t thrilled with the red zone plan. It starts with me,” LaFleur said. “Got to obviously get better. Like I said, I mean, you kick too many field goals in this league, more times than not you’re going to get beat.”

LaFleur pointed out a particular stalled drive, on which Brissett faced immediate pressure and was forced to throw the ball into the ground on third down.

“I mean, that’s what was going to happen,” LaFleur said “We were going on a quick count right there. There was no time based on the cadence that I told Jacoby to go on. He couldn’t have flippered that protection right there. That was what it was.”

The first-year coach zeroed in on another failed Red Zone third down — on which a pass to Trey McBride fell incomplete in the second quarter. LaFleur noted the need for Brissett and McBride to be “on the same page” in that moment, but quickly shouldered his own portion of the blame.

“I wouldn’t say that I talked about that concept being called that low, you know, and so it’s like I could take it a step further and say, man, I could have done a better job of prepping them, you know,” LaFleur said.

“I don’t put stuff on players if we haven’t prepped it, if we haven’t practiced it. I just don’t believe in that. If you did something a month ago, you don’t just pull it out of the hat and expect them to execute it. … It’s bad coaching. It’s putting it on the players and it’s not their responsibility.”

Certainly, both LaFleur’s game plan and the execution of the offensive group was enough to be quite productive. They moved the ball for 393 total yards, converted six of 14 third-down chances scored on six of 11 drives without a turnover. And yet, LaFleur knows there is more that might have been unlocked.

It’s indicative of the type of adaptable, fluid approach to the offensive scheme that often felt absent from the previous regime.

Former head coach Jonathan Gannon did, to his credit, always say the onus of a poor performance fell on him. But where the old staff often made fan-infuriating statements to the effect of “loving” poor play calls and poor game plans — pointing to execution as the lone culprit of a bad outcome — LaFleur has stayed one step ahead of that criticism.

There will be moments where a rookie head coach, calling plays full-time for only the second time in his career, makes bad decisions. LaFleur is trying to stay one step ahead of those mistakes — moments he’s referred to hypothetically this offseason as “crap calls.” And when it did happen on Sunday, that remained on the top of his mind despite the game’s outcome.

The Cardinals are 1-0. There are 16 games left to play against plenty of higher-quality opponents. As LaFleur himself stated, “humility is a day away in this league.”

But the Cardinals’ offense finally looks like a group capable of maximizing the skillsets of both their star players and their lower-expectation contributors.

And it feels, for the first time in years, like an ever-evolving organism, no longer wholly tethered to the schematic rigidity of what goes through the play caller’s headset.