What Is Kyler Murray Right Now?

When the 2026 NFL league year officially opened, the Arizona Cardinals released Kyler Murray. It was an anticipated move for much of the offseason, since Murray was removed from the lineup (injury severity in question) late last season and more officially since the Cardinals announced they would do so following the scouting combine.

With the official release, that leaves Murray, a former first overall pick, as a free agent. Because of the over $36 million in guarantees remaining on Murray’s deal with Arizona, it is widely believed he’ll sign for a minimum contract this season to build up his value for next offseason. Once the release was imminent, the Minnesota Vikings emerged as the most likely landing spot. The Vikings were expected to be looking for at least competition for J.J. McCarthy, who was the league’s worst quarterback by EPA per play last season. A trade for Murray would have been out of the question for the Vikings due to their draft capital and cap space. But Murray signing for the minimum? That’s an ideal situation for both player and team. With Malik Willis in Miami, Geno Smith with the Jets, and Tua Tagovailoa in Atlanta, the Vikings and Murray appear to be an even mor logical pairing. Murray is already expected to be in Minnesota to take a visit and physical on Thursday.

To understand what the (likely) Vikings are getting, we need to appreciate what Murray is and isn’t at this point in his career. Due to how last season ended and Arizona’s willingness to release Murray, he’s often been presented as another disappointing reclamation project. Going to Minnesota, where Kevin O’Connell revived Sam Darnold, has only made those comparisons stronger. But that’s underselling what Murray has been thus far in his career.

Below is a graph of 40 quarterbacks who have at least 1,000 dropbacks over the past five seasons, charted by EPA per play and success rate in that span. There’s a highlighted group that is, conveniently for this exercise, clustered together. That group contains Murray, Darnold, Daniel Jones, Baker Mayfield, and Geno Smith.

Those quarterbacks are, more or less, the saved reclamation projects of the past few seasons. Murray fits right in with them. Except, this graph includes the reclamation years for the non-Murray passers. Smith gets the benefit of his Seattle years. Darnold has both his Minnesota and Seattle years. Jones gets last season’s Colts bump. Mayfield has all three of his Tampa Bay seasons. Murray is above all of them in EPA per play without the benefit of an improvement in Minnesota. That is to say, Murray would be starting this “reclamation” season already ahead of where these players were with the jump in efficiency.

Even over the past two seasons, albeit with a big difference in dropbacks and attempts, Murray has been better than Darnold in EPA per play.

That’s case No. 1 for Murray’s success in his next stop. Outside of the 2023 season, after he returned from a torn ACL that ended his 2022 early, he’s been at least an average to above-average quarterback. If that’s the floor, it’s significantly better than what the Vikings had at the position last season (one in which they still went 9-8). If there’s untapped potential, Minnesota could get top-half quarterback play from a veteran on a minimum deal.

There is a question of fit and what Murray can do as a quarterback. Because of his size and speed, Murray is widely viewed as a jittery, out-of-structure-reliant passer and that’s not really the case. In 2024, Murray ran the fifth-most dropbacks of under-center play-action in the league. He was efficient enough (0.14 EPA per play) while the Cardinals loved to use play-action to boot Murray out of the pocket and set up screens. But when he had the chance to throw down the field, he could.

Need Murray to throw an open crosser off play-action — a staple in the O’Connell offense? He’s got that too.

Murray wasn’t a consistent, high-volume intermediate middle of the field thrower under Jonathan Gannon and Drew Petzing, which could make for an awkward fit with O’Connell, who favors scheming up throws to the most valuable part of the field. However, those throws were surprisingly a bigger piece of the Kliff Kingsbury offense that Murray started his career under. From 2018-2022, Murray was around league average (17th) in the number of attempts to that area of the field, but he was 10th in EPA per play. If there’s a part of his game ripe for a boost thanks to his surroundings, it’s there.

Even at his best, there are still times Murray will pass up what could be an open throw to scramble, but the upside he brings with his legs can be well worth some of the downside. Every year, there is a “Murray wants to run less and play more from the pocket” story. He certainly can do that and 70% of his limited scrambles in 2025 came when pressured. When healthy, his escapability is still a plus-plus trait.

The most inconsistent part of his game might be the deep ball, where Murray has fluctuated between historically efficient and unusable. There was a run in 2021 when Murray started the season with some of the best deep ball efficiency we’ve seen in the modern NFL, before that tapered off during the second half of the season. Since then, his rate of throws of 20 or more air yards has dropped each season. His 9.9% rate in 2025 ranked 32nd of 45 quarterbacks with at least 100 pass attempts. Over the past two years, a growing number of Murray’s deep throws have been designed to come outside the pocket.

Murray still has the arm and ability to place the ball that makes those throws look pretty when they hit.

There’s still a throw or two per game that could look like the best throw Minnesota would have seen in 2025. Murray is a better thrower in rhythm than given credit for and when there’s trust with the receiver, he can put it in a spot where it’s a completion or nothing.

Timing and touch can also be there to the outside.

Murray had a strange, shortened 2025 season. There was not a lot of range to his game. He finished 22nd in EPA per play among quarterbacks, the same 0.05 average as Justin Herbert, Jalen Hurts, and Lamar Jackson. All of those quarterbacks came to that average in different ways and no one is holding the 2025 season as the model year for any of those quarterbacks. But that does give us a sense of where Murray sat while having what is widely regarded as an unimpressive season — and one that got him both benched and released. What stands out about Murray’s year is both the limited highs and limited lows. The graph below lists the 2025 quarterbacks by overall EPA per play, with a range showing their highest and lowest EPA per play games of the season. Murray finished with the lowest EPA per play for his best game, but the second-highest EPA per play for his worst game.

This is not how we typically think about Murray as a player. We think of a lot more variance to his game, given the erratic nature, it sometimes feels like he can play with at times. But one part of this is more common than you might think — Murray has put up a fairly high floor for most of his career. If we go back to that group of quarterbacks with at least 1,000 dropbacks since 2021, Murray is tied with Joe Burrow for the fifth-lowest bust rate — the percentage of plays that total -1.0 EPA or worse. Staying away from meaningfully negative plays has been a consistent part of Murray’s game over the past five seasons. The big positive plays, however, also haven’t been completely there. Among this group, he ranked 31st in the rate of plays that accounted for 1.0 EPA or more.

This brings us to the question of what Murray is and what can still be pulled out of him. Do we view the potential reclamation project in Minnesota as one that would be expected to raise his floor or one that can raise his ceiling? There’s an argument to be made that this is a ceiling-raising endeavor. When Darnold took over as the Vikings quarterback, the negative plays didn’t disappear. Darnold still put the ball in danger and took some bad sacks. He was 20th in pressure-to-sack rate (Murray was 11th) while he was 19th in interception rate. But there were enough good plays made in the offense to counter those mistakes.

To this point in Murray’s career, he’s largely stayed away from those dangerous, bad plays. If there’s a ceiling-raising impact here that can get some more consistent explosive plays from the quarterback in the passing game, the floor set has already been more than enough to sustain a quality offense. 

Should there be a marriage with O’Connell, it’s hard to imagine how that ceiling gets raised. Over the last four weeks of the 2025 season, J.J. McCarty ranked fifth in EPA per play and had the highest explosive pass rate in the league. No one, not the even the Vikings, are claiming McCarthy was of that quality as a passer during that stretch — one where he was forced to leave with multiple injuries — but it was more proof that the Vikings coach can scheme up a successful offense for a quarterback who had been the league’s least efficient quarterback, by far, to that point in the season.

Murray is going to get lumped in with those other perceived failed high picks who need saving. But Murray will come to his new team with a much higher baseline than any of those other quarterbacks who found new success with their new teams. If Murray just sticks with the high-floor play, it could be enough to control an offense that saw the bottom fall out on multiple occasions. There’s also the potential for some of the play-making that made Murray the No. 1 overall pick to come out, which could make his offense one of the better units in the league.

Worse bets have been made on worse quarterbacks and thanks to the guaranteed money left on his contract with the Cardinals, a bet on Murray is as cheap as one could get.