The 1978 St. Louis Cardinals season was the team's 59th year with the National Football League and the 19th season in St. Louis. The controversial recruitment of 62-year-old former Oklahoma Sooners coach Bud Wilkinson was a failure, as the team, already affected by becoming the first opponent team to lose visiting the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, failed to maintain the standard of the previous four seasons. St. Louis lost its first eight games to be out of the running for the playoffs by midseason, and even a sequence of six wins in eight games failed to move them beyond a tie for last in its division.