The 26-year-old quarterback is closing in on a return date from his ACL tear. But now that Arizona sits at 1-6 and two enticing quarterback prospects are coming up in the draft, will the team want to stick with him long term? Or move on at the trade deadline?
Kyler Murray is playing football again. Well, he’s practicing football again. The Arizona Cardinals’ highly paid quarterback returned to practice last week for the first time since suffering an ACL tear late in the 2022-23 season. Coach Jonathan Gannon says Murray is day-to-day, but the team’s Week 10 game against the Atlanta Falcons is his target return date, according to reports. Murray’s return should be seen as a momentous occasion—a star quarterback back in action after a 10-month layoff. Instead, it just feels a little awkward, for a number of reasons.
The first is that Arizona isn’t exactly operating like a team that’s overly concerned with winning football games at the moment. That’s not to say the Cardinals are tanking: Look into Gannon’s eyes and tell me that man has a cynical bone in his body. He’s making laser sounds just seconds into a conversation with a complete stranger! He’s trying his hardest to win, but rebuilding the roster has taken precedence this year. Arizona said goodbye to veteran stars like J.J. Watt, DeAndre Hopkins, Isaiah Simmons, and Byron Murphy this offseason and made little effort to replace them. And instead of holding on to the no. 3 pick in April’s draft, the Cardinals traded back to accumulate more picks for the future. Gannon says the word “rebuild” makes him cringe—talk about a pot-kettle situation—but I’m struggling to come up with a better word.
The second reason is that the last time we saw Murray in a game for the Cardinals, the team had a different coach and a different general manager—both of whom seemed to have a somewhat hostile relationship with the quarterback. Before Murray signed a five-year, $230 million extension in 2022, he had a public spat with the front office and scrubbed his social media accounts of any mention of the Cardinals. Then, once he did sign the contract, it was leaked that the deal included a clause that required Murray to do at least four hours of film study per week—something that would be seen as a red flag for any position, but especially for a quarterback.
Finally, the Cardinals and first-year general manager Monti Ossenfort are the proud owners of six picks in the first three rounds of next year’s draft. And with a 1-6 record, Arizona is currently a half game behind Carolina in the race for the top spot in the draft order. Next year’s class features (at least) two blue-chip quarterback prospects, including a supposedly generational talent in USC’s Caleb Williams, so you can understand why many people assume Murray may not be a part of the team’s plans for the future. And if the Cardinals do want to move on, the October 31 trade deadline presents a natural opening. NFL teams don’t typically trade productive franchise quarterbacks with first-round pedigrees, especially ones locked into long-term deals. But this case is a bit more complicated.
A fact that’s easy to forget in all the mess of Arizona’s past few seasons is that Murray is still really freaking good at football. Murray has been overlooked a lot lately because he has missed the first half of this season and was stuck in Kliff Kingsbury’s Potemkin-ass offense in the years before that. But during the two seasons before Murray’s injury-shortened 2022 campaign, only six quarterbacks had a better success rate on dropbacks and only eight averaged more yards per play, per TruMedia. And he did that through a unique blend of playmaking, arm talent, and accuracy. We’ve seen smaller quarterbacks succeed in the NFL before, but not in the ways Murray has early in his career. It hasn’t even been a full two years since the Cardinals were sitting at 8-1 and Murray was a leading MVP candidate. I mean, just watch this highlight video of the then-24-year-old doing unreal stuff on the field.
The list of quarterbacks capable of making those plays is short, and none of the other guys on it have had their capacity to lead a team questioned as much as Murray. When the reports about the homework clause dropped, an old interview in which Murray admitted he didn’t watch much film in his free time popped back up, which didn’t help the perception that he wasn’t a hard worker. “I think I was blessed with the cognitive skills to just go out there and just see it before it happens,” he told The New York Times in 2021. “I don’t sit there for 24 hours and break down this team and that team and watch every game because, in my head, I see so much.”
While that may sound like a guy who’s trying to skip out on extra work, there’s plenty of film to back up his claims. Even when the Cardinals offense was humming along under Kingsbury, it was at its best when Murray was out there just vibing rather than rigidly adhering to the play design. In 2020 and 2021, Murray and Arizona got off to fast starts thanks to the quarterback’s improvisation skills. But when defenses eventually adjusted, Kingsbury struggled to find solutions other than “Make a play, Kyler,” which contributed to the idea that Murray couldn’t play in a more prototypical NFL passing game.
While I wouldn’t be worried that Murray isn’t preparing for games like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, the difference between him and those guys that does concern me is size. The elephant in the room is that Murray, at 5-foot-10 and 207 pounds, is small for an NFL quarterback. And the early part of his career has been derailed by issues that smaller passers tend to have, like injuries and the need to bail from the pocket to get a clearer picture of the field. All the film study in the world won’t help him see over the pass rush, nor will it keep him healthy.
