1996 Arizona Cardinals season

The 1996 Arizona Cardinals season was the 77th season the team was in the league and 9th in Arizona. The team improved upon their previous output of 4–12, winning seven games. Despite the improvement, the Cardinals failed to qualify to the playoffs for the fourteenth consecutive season.

The low point of the season was providing a notorious New York Jets team with its only win in front of less than thirty thousand people. This was the first time the Cardinals had opposed the Jets since 1978. The reason for this is that before the admission of the Texans in 2002, NFL scheduling formulas for games outside a team’s division were much more influenced by table position during the previous season.