It was Week 8 of the 2021 National Football League season and Kyler Murray was marching down the field.
The Arizona Cardinals quarterback was chewing up yards with his accurate arm and flurried feet, and it seemed like there could only be one outcome. Because this was Murray. He’d started a potential game-winning Thursday night drive against the Green Bay Packers on his own 1-yard line, and now there were just four yards to go and 15 seconds left.
It seems extraordinary to think now, 20 months later and with Murray having plummeted drastically down the nationwide QB pecking order and the Cardinals having imploded spectacularly, but this was the most anticipated game of the season to that point. Arizona was 7-0, Green Bay 6-1.
Murray was a player at the peak of his powers, on a team that was surging and brim-full of confidence, and if he and they didn’t look completely unstoppable it was something pretty darn close to it. Stardom didn’t just beckon for Murray; he was there already, the linchpin piece of a Super Bowl contender.
Ex-Cardinals GM on QB Kyler Murray: “He can improve”
A pass intended for A.J. Green was thrown early and intercepted by Rasul Douglas. The Packers kneeled out the clock. The trajectory ever since for Murray and the Cardinals hasn’t just been a dropoff; it has been a headlong dive into an elevator shaft.
How quickly we have become used to Arizona being bad. Ever since that night the team is 8-19, bad enough for coach Kliff Kingsbury to be fired in January, while general manager Steve Keim stepped down for health reasons. They’re projected to be one of the worst teams in the league in 2023 and any good news is restricted to any savvy administrative moves designed to facilitate a rebuild.
Murray is no longer seen as one of the best QBs around and a megastar with a shining future. As he rehabs an ACL injury suffered near the end of last season, it is unknown how long before he will be back. Guesses and reports have ranged from there being a faint possibility he starts the season, all the way to a return in Week 12.
“I know he’s making strides,” new head coach Jonathan Gannon told reporters last month. “I mean, he’s a long way away, but we don’t play for a long time either. So, I feel good where he’s at.”
The contract extension he signed a year ago looks like an anchor for the franchise. Five years, $230.5 million doesn’t really fit neatly with a reboot. With a trove of tantalizing draft picks in Arizona’s possession, and QB-heavy draft coming next summer, Murray is considered one of the likeliest quarterbacks in the NFL to no longer be with his team after the current year, even with a huge payout inevitable on the Cardinals‘ books.
The NFL is the most unforgiving league in sports, the ultimate home of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, a place where downward spirals are not uncommon. Despite all that, the tumble taken by Murray and the Cardinals has been especially drastic.
Everything has been botched. It is like every bit of good fortune and solid decision-making was used up in that frenzied start to 2021. Nothing has gone right since, not even the execution of Murray’s deal, which initially included an addendum referring to personal playbook study. Whatever the intent behind it, it was interpreted as a “we don’t trust you to do your homework clause” and left the player and his employer open to ridicule.
So what now?
Murray is actually catching some positive publicity for the way he is handling his rehab, with details emerging that he is spending hour upon hour at the team’s training facility while playing an active and engaged role in team meetings.
“I was a Kyler Murray fan before,” left tackle D.J. Humphries told the Arizona Republic. “But I’m a big Kyler Murray fan now, for sure.”
It could get tricky if Murray isn’t available until several weeks into the season, and if the Cardinals make as bad a start as most people expect. This is hypothetical, obviously, but what do you do with Murray at that point?
Throw him in and see what he can do? Give him extra time to recover? Do you try to make him look as good as possible in order to generate some return on him in the trade market?
It gets murky and messy at the end of the forthcoming season. If the Cardinals are in a position to land a top QB in the draft they could surely be persuaded to move on move Murray — but his contract would have more than $80 million in dead money remaining. If Arizona could arrange a trade, they would save $38.9 million off the 2024 cap.
But the most remarkable part is that we are even talking like this, and that such an outcome now seems probable.
From where Murray was, and the direction he seemed to be headed, to this.
Most players never become stars. Some spent years in that elite realm. Murray touched upon it for the briefest of moments. And then, along with that flickering hope for the Cardinals, it was gone.
