Who is the real Kyler Murray?
Purple Insider spent the summer trying to find out the person and player behind the narratives
By Matthew Coller
The strange thing about Kyler Murray’s career is that the opinions on him from NFL analysts can be wildly different depending on the date. For example, if you asked someone on November 10, 2024 about Murray, most would have told you that he was finally becoming the complete quarterback that everyone dreamed he could be. They would have declared offensive coordinator Drew Petzing the Murray Whisperer and said that head coach Jonathan Gannon’s approach to working with Murray pushed him toward greatness rather than coddling him like Kliff Kingsbury.
On November 10, 2024, Murray had just reeled off his fourth win in a row for Arizona Cardinals, who were heading to the bye week as one of the pleasant surprises of the NFL. He had just completed 22-of-24 passes in a 31-6 win over the New York Jets to improve the Cards to 6-4 on the season. Murray was named Gatorade Player of the Week.
“The quarterback was the best player on the planet today,” Cardinals coach Jonathan Gannon told the media following the win over the Jets.
Overall, he was completing 69.2% of his passes and had 2,058 yards at 7.5 yards per attempt with 12 touchdowns to just three interceptions and a 100.8 passer rating. He had also only been sacked 15 times and rushed 46 times for 371 yards and four touchdowns. He was PFF’s seventh highest graded quarterback at that point.
On November 11, 2024, FOX Sports published a breakdown of every game from the weekend with the title, “Kyler Murray squarely in MVP race.”
At that time, nobody was talking about Murray playing video games. Nobody was talking about whether he “really loves the game.” Nobody was asking whether he was a good enough leader of men.
Those questions only came up again during the following weeks. Out of the bye week, the Cardinals faced Seahawks, Vikings, Seahawks. They lost all three to those top-notch defenses, including falling to Minnesota on a last-minute Sam Darnold drive after Gannon settled for a field goal that only put the Cards up six points. Murray then beat the lowly Patriots and lost an overtime game to Carolina in which the offense posted 30 points but the defense gave up 36.
Then with the season on the line, Murray struggled against the Los Angeles Rams, and the Cardinals’ playoff hopes were dashed.
From Week 11 through Week 17, PFF graded Murray has the 23rd best QB out of 38 and his passer rating fell to 79.5 in that stretch.
Out came the knives.
The Washington Post’s Jason La Canfora played all the hits in late December 2024. He quoted anonymous executives wondering why he always runs out of gas down the stretch and saying that they couldn’t believe the Cardinals paid him. He mentioned “suspect work habits.”
Amazing how the Murray narrative bounces back and forth like a snowbird going from Minnesota to Arizona in the winter and back to Minnesota in the summer.
Last year Murray started out the season OK but his team was a disaster in the clutch, losing three games by a total of five points, including a 21-6 blown lead against the Tennessee Titans. He was dealing with a foot injury that appeared like it would keep him out for a couple of weeks but instead they decided to stick with Jacoby Brissett and improve their draft status. When the season ended, they fired Gannon and cut Murray.
Now that the Minnesota Vikings have signed Murray with hopes that he can get them back to a “baseline” of quarterback performance, the NFL is wondering whether Kevin O’Connell has another Sam Darnold in his pocket — a flawed quarterback who can be harnessed by a great passing scheme and outstanding weapons — or if Murray will always be the rollercoaster quarterback who ends the season in disappointment.
The thing about Murray is that he is 28 years old and has been in the NFL since 2019, and yet he remains a complete enigma. Why is he so hot and cold? Why do people seem to talk about his personality so much? How much was Arizona to blame? Can he really lead a team with high expectations?
Over the last four months since Murray signed with the Vikings, I have attempted to speak with as many people as posible about the veteran quarterback. From folks who covered him in high school to people with knowledge of the Cardinals organization to NFL evaluators and executives to former teammates.
The circle
While there are plenty of people with opinions about Murray, the hardest part of the endeavor was trying to find someone who really knows Murray. I kept hearing, “he has a small circle.”
However, I was able to connect with someone within Murray’s circle, former Arizona Cardinals running back Chase Edmonds, who played with him from 2019 until 2021.
“I don’t want to say he’s a closed off person, but he’s just a very personal person,” Edmonds told Purple Insider over the phone. “Like his circle is his circle. And unless you’re in that circle, you might not see all of who K1 is from that personality standpoint.”
Edmonds said that in the earliest days of Murray’s career the team’s PR had to “drag him to the podium” because he wasn’t fond of the public speaking element of being an NFL quarterback.
“To the public eyes, it can come across almost like standoffish because he’s just quiet, man,” Edmonds said. “It’s a unique blend of personalities, where you just have this guy that is quiet, but super confident. Definitely a jokester, man. When we would get together, the guys back in AZ, he always had jokester days.”
Edmonds became close with Murray because they were two young players on a rising team. They would work out together along with Murray’s dad, Kevin, a former Texas A&M quarterback.
“When we were doing routes and throwing, [Kyler] would be out there all day with us, if we didn’t get s— right,” Edmonds said. “That’s the one thing that I can always just take from my friendship from him, the moments that I got to actually play ball with him, how much we would actually work when we got together, the sessions and how intense it would be, trying to get everything literally squared away and as perfect as it could be.”
When Murray was drafted and Kliff Kingsbury hired as head coach, the Cardinals began building their team around their No. 1 overall draft pick quarterback, particularly with a trade for receiver DeAndre Hopkins that took their group of weapons around Murray to the next level. By Murray’s second season in 2020, Arizona had produced an 8-win season and had the No. 6 ranked offense in the NFL in total yards.
The world was buying Murray’s ascent. Edmonds saw him pushing to take the next step.
“If I were to use two words to describe Kyler, it would be: competitor and confident,” he said. “K1’s one of the most competitive people I’ve ever got to grace the locker room with. Also there’s just the aura and the confidence that he brings in the huddle, the confidence that he approaches the field with.”
During the 2021 season, the Cardinals opened the season 7-0 with Murray playing like an MVP and they were one play against Green Bay away from an 8-0 start.
“Every Tuesday we’d have dinner at his house and we would talk about the games or talk about the Monday night game or the game that we had coming up,” Edmonds said. “Man, I just remember the conversations that we had and the aspirations that we wanted when we were so young about where we wanted to go.”
Murray got hurt in the game against the Packers in ‘21 and missed three games. When he returned, they only won two out of seven games, including losing to the eventual Super Bowl champion Rams in the playoffs.
The way that season played out was crushing to the tight-knit Cards. Along the way, there have been suggestions that Murray doesn’t love football or doesn’t care about winning but Edmonds says it’s the opposite.
“He took losses super, super hard,” Edmonds said. “I think that was also a combination of, he didn’t go through a lot of adversity in high school and college, but also just how competitive he was. Like, he truly wanted to win. I mean, everybody wants to win every game, but he truly, truly, wanted to win bro. Those losses really hurt his soul, you know?
Edmonds suggested that growth and scar tissue from adversity has helped Murray learn to deal with failure and not let the tough losses compound.
But I was curious, why hasn’t Murray ever tried to explain to the world the work that he’s putting in or how badly he wants to win? There are some quarterbacks — take Baker Mayfield, for example — who will clap back when certain narratives are spun about them.
“He can say something back, but then all it is just more clickbait for someone to somehow misconstrue and angle it at a different way, right?” Edmonds said. “It just opens the door for more nonsense. I feel like when you’re a quarterback, no matter what, people are going to talk about you. It doesn’t matter what you say, what you don’t say. You’re going to be a talking point in the National Football League if you’re a starting quarterback.”
I was also curious about Murray’s leadership style. During OTAs and minicamp, there weren’t too many examples of Murray being demonstrative in any way. At one point, he threw a brilliant deep pass to Jordan Addison that traveled about 40 yards in the air and settled right in the receiver’s hands as if Murray had walked up and placed it there. I looked back at the quarterback and there was no reaction. He doesn’t seem to have typical quarterback body language in those moments.
“He never was like...high-fiving guys because he’s very much a business approach when he’s out there,” Edmonds explained. “If I had to guess, I would bet K1’s mindset right now is to win that damn job and it’s all business. So he’s not going out there singing Kumbaya with people. He’s probably going very much business approach until [he’s the guy]. I think until that moment you probably won’t see those instances.”
I ask Edmonds about the coaching and organizational structure and how they might have impacted Murray’s results in Arizona. He’s a Fordham man, so he puts it to me this way:
“Out of all the main American professional sports, organizational structure, head coaching competency for the NFL is the most determining factor of… a player’s success,” Edmonds said. “You see it time after time now. Someone like Sam Darnold, who is talented as hell, by the way, finally goes to a structural organization and wins the damn Super Bowl. The year before won 14 games in Minnesota. It is so much of a determining factor of how a player can just grow and get their confidence and be better.”
That brings us to the next part of the conversation…
The survey, the clause
A major part of trying to find out about Kyler Murray was determining exactly how different his circumstances in Minnesota are going to be in comparison to Arizona.
That discussion begins with the NFL Players Association survey. This year, the league tried to keep the results of an anonymous poll taken by the NFLPA that graded every aspect of each franchise. ESPN’s Kalyn Kahler obtained the results and, well, you will notice a stark difference between Arizona and Minnesota. The Cardinals rated 31st, while the Vikings were No. 2.
Arizona’s owner was graded an F (up from an F-minus the previous year) and Minnesota’s was given an A+. The Cardinals’ offensive coordinator got a B-minus, while the Vikings’ head coach/playcaller Kevin O’Connell got an A and OC got an A-minus.
The organizational competence of the Cardinals has come under fire numerous times during owner Michael Bidwill’s tenure both from a football perspective and internal operations.
In 2023, the team’s former VP of player personnel filed a complaint accusing Bidwill of gross misconduct in allegations that involved discrimination and harrassment. The accusations included that Bidwill retaliated against people within the organization who pushed back against his attempts to communicate with general manager Steve Keim during a five-week suspension for a DUI. The words “working in fear” were used to describe the workplace culture. In 2025, former assistant Brittany Neuheisel sued Bidwell on claims related to workplace harassment.
One person with knowledge of the situation told Purple Insider that Bidwill’s reactionary decision-making caused chaos within the team.
The relationship between the people at the top — Bidwill and former GM Steven Keim — and Murray is complicated. Bidwill is said to have been a believer in Murray and Keim was the GM who boldly traded top pick Josh Rosen in favor of picking Murray.
But when Murray had a strong 2021 season overall that resulted in him being ranked by PFF as a top-10 quarterback, contract negotiations got very dicy between the two sides. At one point, Murray’s agent released a massive statement sending a message to the Cardinals to put pressure on them to complete his contract extension.
A person with knowledge of the negotiations said that the team was deeply frustrated with the way Murray’s agent had held them hostage. At that point, the price of QB extensions was exploding and Murray landed a $230 million deal over five years with over $100 million guaranteed. But the annoyed Cardinals made sure to fire a shot across the bow to their quarterback by leaking to Ian Rapoport of NFL Network that there was an “independent study” clause within the contract. Rapoport tweeted out the entire clause, which set off a firestorm of people talking about Murray not being committed to his craft.
Eventually the clause was removed. That didn’t stop folks from holding it against him for the rest of his existence, of course.
Murray held a press conference in which he called the clause “disrespectful” and said, "there’s multiple different ways to watch film. Of course we all watch film. That doesn’t need to be questioned. I refuse to let my work ethic and my preparation be in question. I’ve put in an incomprehensible amount of time in what I do.”
However, in an interview with the New York Times, he made a comment that may have hurt his case.
"I think I was blessed with the cognitive skills to just go out there and just see it before it happens," he said. "I'm not one of those guys that's going to sit there and kill myself watching film. 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."
One person close to Murray said that he has an incredible, near photographic memory, and that he may rely on that too much. Another said that his process in Arizona was to spend the day at the facility working on his game preparation and film study but he did not take the film study element home with him in those early years with the Cardinals.
That’s hard to comprehend considering the complexity of the quarterback position.
Because Murray is a fan of gaming, like playing Call of Duty online or blitz chess on Chess.com, the internet took shots at him in any way they could, even producing a “study” of when the new video games would come out versus his performance.
“I had a person say to me, ‘would you rather have him go to a night club or strip club and that’s how they decompress or would you rather have him go home and throw on the video game and watch some TV, he’s not getting in trouble,’” ESPN’s Josh Weinfuss told Purple Insider.
“It was never really a thing,” said teammate Trey McBride on Bussin’ with the Boys about Kyler’s video game distractions. “He never talked about playing video games, but every single week he was in the media…he never talked about gaming or anything. I think they were just finding any stat to get on him.”
Weinfuss also said that Kingsbury implemented a hybrid college/NFL offense that was reflective of Murray’s Air Raid offense at Oklahoma and was “basic stuff.” Murray had been running something similar since eighth grade when his coach learned it from Kingsbury at a coaching clinic. Murray knew the offense’s details inside and out because he’d been using it for his entire football life.
“I think everyone’s study habits are different and how they learn is very different,” Weinfuss said.
Some believe that Kingsbury did not push hard enough on Murray to learn the ways of the National Football League. Cardinals analyst Alex Clancy told Purple Insider that he viewed Kingsbury as a “PE coach when he needed a cool history teacher who would smack you with a ruler but make you smarter.”
And Weinfuss said that Murray wanted to be coached harder rather than have things simplified.
“What I heard multiple times was that Kyler Murray loves to be coached, he loves to be yelled at,” Weinfuss said. “His high school coach MF’d him, his college coach MF’d him, Kliff never did. Kliff handled him with kid gloves. Everything was very soft. I think having that type of approach as he entered the NFL, I think that was the root of some of the issues.”
By the end of Kingsbury’s tenure, he and Murray were hardly speaking and Kingsbury was no longer attending QB meetings because the relationship had soured to that point.
“Those two hardly talked at all the last year-and-a-half of Kliff’s tenure,” Weinfuss said. “Kingsbury stopped going to quarterback meetings because of his relationship with Kyler. It was not good. There’s blame on both sides. Everyone wants to pin it on one or the other but that’s not fair and not accurate.”
Murray suffered a torn ACL midway through a miserable 2022 season and when he returned he had a different coach in Gannon.
The Cardinals hired Kubiak/Shanahan-inspired offensive coordinator Drew Petzing to implement a more pro-style offense that put Murray under center more often and utilized the run game to build off with play-actions. The plan was essentially similar to what the Seahawks did last year with Sam Darnold: Put Murray in more favorable passing situations rather than asking him to do it all.
Murray learned the offense.
“When Drew Petzing got there, [Kyler] studied hard — he had to study hard,” Weinfuss said. “This wasn’t basic. It wasn’t addition, subtraction, division and multiplication, this was pre-calculus. It was algebra. It was an advanced level of football, so the work ethic thing is ridiculous.”
At the same time, he clicked with Gannon as well.
“Kyler Murray and Jonathan Gannon got along very well,” Weinfuss said. “They lived near each other and Kyler had gone to Jonathan’s house to watch the Super Bowl and they would call each other on the way home from games to debrief. They were very close.”
“People make these assumptions and create these narratives and they run with it,” Weinfuss said. “But I’ve seen him do things that are against what everyone is saying.”
The independent study clause still lingers though.
“I don’t want to hear about my franchise quarterback that he’s going home and playing video games,” one former NFL evalutor told Purple Insider.
In Mike Sando’s Quarterback Tiers piece last year, a GM said:
"I still don't trust him. He has [second tier] talent but is still a [third tier] to me. Is he committed to it? He always tends to tail off as the season goes on."
And there are some who still see his less extroverted way of approaching the game as a detriment.
“To me, it starts with body language. As a quarterback, a lot of guys on the team look to see how you carry yourself,” former teammate Patrick Peterson told 98.7 The Game in Arizona. “If he’s continuing to not have good energy and (not) cheering his teammates up, the team is going to continue to look the way that it’s looking.”
Supporting cast
In the same article, Sando mentioned this tidbit: “Arizona owes its 14-22 record in Murray's last 36 starts to its defense (-110.4 EPA), not its offense (+41.6 EPA) or its special teams (+0.8 EPA, which is near average).”
During the three years that Murray was with Gannon in Arizona, the Cardinals went 13-17 when Murray started and 2-19 when he did not.
In a league where Sam Darnold went from starting his career 21-34 with a 78.2 quarterback rating to 28-6 with a 100.9 rating and a Super Bowl ring over the last two years, is it possible that Murray has been greatly impacted by the folks around him?
How do we figure that out?
For starters, as Sando wrote, the Cardinals’ defense has done Murray very few favors. Since 2019, only Detroit, Carolina and Las Vegas have allowed more points against.
The Cardinals are only 31-26 in games where the QB finishes with a passer rating over 90 since 2019. The Eagles are 48-12 when their QB clears the 90.0 threshold.
One of the reasons Arizona’s defense has struggled so much was their failures in drafting around Murray.
The website PerThirtySix.com does historical draft value charts and they ranked the Cardinals 31st since 2019. One by one, their drafts after 2019 ranked 27th, 28th, 12th, 15th, 31st and 28th. Here is their entire drafting chart:
They were on the other side of the trade that sent Will Anderson Jr. to the Houston Texans. The draft pick that they acquired in that deal turned into defensive tackle Darius Robinson, who ranked as the worst starting DT in the NFL by PFF last year.
They missed on Isaiah Simmons, the No. 8 overall pick in 2020. Players like Tristan Wirfs, AJ Terrell, CeeDee Lamb and Justin Jefferson were still on the board. In 2021, they took Zaven Collins at No. 16. He has become a starter but not a difference maker, ranking highly as a run defender but 80th out of 80 edge rushers by PFF last season.
The Cards nailed the Trey McBride pick and he turned into a star with Murray at quarterback but they whiffed on replacing DeAndre Hopkins and Larry Fitzgerald with highly-touted WR prospect Marvin Harrison Jr.
When Murray targeted Hopkins during his time as a Cardinal, the QB’s passer rating was 109.5 on 259 attempts. When he targeted McBride on 263 attempts, his rating was 94.5 with a 74.9% completion percentage. But when he tried to get the ball to Harrison Jr., he only completed 55.4% with an 87.4 rating.
Harrison Jr. only caught 16 of 38 contested-catch opportunities in 2024, which ranked 79th out of 99 starting and part-time receivers. He and Murray struggled to get on the same page at times with the details of plays and his focus early in the 2025 season was questioned. A drop on a wide open throw against the 49ers proved costly in a one-point loss, for example.
Things didn’t change when Murray went out in 2025 as Harrison Jr. only caught 21 passes on 41 targets from Jacoby Brissett in seven games.
The challenging thing to parse through is how much Murray could have done to overcome some of the shortcomings.
While his team did have issues around him, he hasn’t come through when his team has needed him. Over Murray’s career, he has just a 78.3 passer rating in the final four minutes of games in which his team is trailing and he’s only gone 18-24 in games separated by one score.
He has struggled mightily on third-and-long with ratings of 76.0 between 7-9 yards to go on third down and 75.9 with 10 or more yards to go. Too often opportunities to close out games are missed.
“I can’t remember the last time Murray was in victory formation,” Locked On Cards’ Alex Clancy told Purple Insider.
“The question I have is: Will he make hits to make the game-winning throw?” Clancy said. “I don’t know if the answer is yes.”
Minnesota?
I asked a former NFL scout: What if Kyler Murray’s draft status set unfair expectations and he really is similar to a lot of other quarterbacks who are good enough to win with good teams but flawed enough to struggle with bad teams?
“I think he’s closer to the Lamar Jackson, Mahomes, Burrow talent than he is [quarterbacks] who can be pushed either way [by circumstances],” he said.
That may be the tough part for people with Murray. Because he was a No. 1 overall draft pick and a breathtaking player early in his career, the failure to meet expectations is perceived much differently than if he had been a second-round draft pick.
Volatile players always flummox analysts too. We can see on paper where a lot of Murray’s ups and downs come from. In 2025, Murray graded by PFF as the seventh best quarterback against pressure. In 2024, he was 30th. In 2023, 15th. In 2021, 7th. In 2020, 10th. In 2019, 20th.
Basically, all over the place. His size and playmaking style opens the door for having things really work for stretches and then fall apart for stretches. Quarterbacks who love to throw the ball downfield like Eli Manning and Joe Flacco were like that during their careers. When they got hot, they were able to win. When they were cold throwing downfield, they failed.
A similar current quarterback is Baker Mayfield, who was a risk-taking, volatile player who came on the scene strong with Cleveland as the No. 1 pick and then struggled with Carolina before finding himself with a stable organization and good supporting cast in Tampa Bay.
“Coming from someone who has been in a similar situation where you think you’re going to be somewhere forever and just needing a new change of scenery… I think this fresh start for him is going to be amazing,” Mayfield said earlier this offseason at a youth camp. “Kyler gets a bad rap. People want to put a certain persona on him.”
When things went sideways, Mayfield’s personality was scrutinized. When things went well, it was ignored and he was lauded.
The question is how much the Vikings’ outstanding situation with their offensive weapons can even out the volatility? Here’s how the supporting casts of the Vikings since Kevin O’Connell arrived compare to Murray’s career since 2020 by PFF grade and defensive points allowed:
The gap between receiving and defense really jumps off the page.
In terms of blocking, it is vital that the Vikings protect Murray.
When he had good protection in Arizona, he was very good in 2024 and posted strong clean pocket numbers. He was the 8th highest graded clean pocket QB by PFF and led the NFL in clean pocket Big-Time Throws.
Even during his rough 2022 season, Murray still was 21st of 40 QBs when clean and had the 16th best QB rating.
In 2021, he was the 4th best clean-pocket QB in the NFL by PFF and 10th by QB rating.
Chase Edmonds admits that he’s biased when it comes to his analysis of Murray because they are friends but he strongly believes that things are going to click in Minnesota.
“I can’t wait to see him in that system and with a guy that can just make the game so much easier for him,” Edmonds said. “This is the first time he’s going to go in and 90% of the time he’s going to have the best coaching staff on the field.”
All summer long, analysts have ping ponged back and forth about what Murray will do with the Vikings, assuming he wins the quarterback competition versus JJ McCarthy. Some think he will win the division and become the long-term Minnesota quarterback. Some think the Vikings will finish last in the NFC North and that he will be mediocre.
And that’s why they play the games.
What we do know is that Murray will have his chance to rewrite all the narratives on his career in the same way that Sam Darnold did. All of the criticisms of the past will disappear if he performs like a franchise QB and the Vikings finish with a top-10 offense.
Is it fair to say that the real Kyler Murray will be revealed this year? Maybe. Maybe not. But he will never have a better opportunity in his career to set the record straight.
“I think he’s going to win comeback player of the year and I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes the Pro Bowl….I’m definitely going to be a Minnesota fan,” Edmonds said.