Cardinals' Carson Palmer signs 3-year extension

PHOENIX (AP) Carson Palmer has signed a three-year contract extension with the Arizona Cardinals. The move announced Friday puts the 34-year-old quarterback,

PHOENIX (AP) Carson Palmer has signed a three-year contract extension with the Arizona Cardinals.

The move announced Friday puts the 34-year-old quarterback, playing some of the best football of his long career, under contract with the team through 2017.

Palmer, in his second season with Arizona, has thrown for 11 touchdowns with just two interceptions, helping the Cardinals to a 7-1 record, the best mark in the NFL and the franchise's best record through eight games in 40 years. He is 5-0 in games he started this year going into Sunday's home contest against St. Louis.

Arizona acquired Palmer in a trade with Oakland prior to the 2013 season. In his 12th NFL season, Palmer is 15-6 as a starter since coming to the Cardinals. Arizona has won 12 of Palmer's last 14 starts.

He missed three games this season with a ''dead'' nerve in his throwing shoulder but returned to lead the team to four straight wins.

''Carson has played at an incredibly high level and has been a huge part of the team's success,'' general manager Steve Keim said in the news release announcing the signing. ''When you combined his on-field performance with the leadership, stability and professionalism he brings to the team, there was no question that we wanted to extend the relationship and are excited he felt the same way.''

The former Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 draft pick has thrived in coach Bruce Arians' system, although it took him a half-season to get comfortable with its intricacies

No quarterback has a better win percentage that Palmer's over the past 14 games. In that span, he has thrown for 3,914 yards, with 27 touchdowns and 11 interceptions, for a quarterback rating of 90.0.

He is on a string of five consecutive games with multiple touchdown passes and has thrown for at least one score in a career-best 18 straight starts.

The Cincinnati Bengals picked Palmer as the No. 1 overall selection in the 2003 draft out of USC.

In his third season, he took the Bengals to the playoffs but went down with a severe knee injury on his first pass of the postseason game against Pittsburgh. In 2011, he sat out the first six games of the season in a dispute with ownership and was traded to Oakland.

After the 2012 season, the Raiders decided to go younger at quarterback and Palmer came to Arizona at very little cost. The deal had Arizona swapping a sixth-round pick for Oakland's seventh-round pick. He signed a three-year contract with the Cardinals after the trade.

In his first season in the desert, Palmer threw for a career-high 4,274 yards, becoming the first quarterback in league history to throw for at least 4,000 yards for three teams. He did it twice for Cincinnati and once for Oakland.

In his 142 games as a starter, Palmer has completed 62.5 percent of his passes for 35,124 yards with 224 touchdowns and 154 interceptions, for a quarterback rating of 86.4.

Toiling with mostly losing teams through his career, he has appeared in only two playoff games.

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