New, revealing information about Kyler Murray’s contract negotiation from the summer of 2022 has come to light.
On June 24, the investigative podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” published pieces of a 61-page document from that year, when the NFL Players Association lost a claim that the league was colluding to prevent teams from offering fully guaranteed contracts.
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The document centers around Lamar Jackson’s contract negotiations in the aftermath of Deshaun Watson’s extension — an unprecedented, fully guaranteed deal. But it also includes some key information about Murray.
In the spring of 2022, after the Watson deal was announced, Murray’s agent, Erik Burkhardt, communicated to the Cardinals that a fully guaranteed deal was important to Murray.
During that time, Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill separately texted then-general manager Steve Keim, writing, “We are going to load up this contract with … so many incentives to earn the real money.”
Keim responded: “Why the Browns felt so compelled to pay Watson like that is baffling.”
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In the end, Bidwill and Keim got their way. Murray’s total contract value eclipsed Watson’s by $500,000, but only $103 million of the $230.5 million was fully guaranteed. And in the final two years of his deal — 2027 and 2028 — Murray has zero guaranteed money, meaning that the Cardinals can release him with a minimal cap hit after the 2026 season.
That deal fell in line with how big-money contracts typically work in the NFL. When Jackson eventually signed his own extension, only $135 million of his $260 million deal was guaranteed, despite his widely accepted status as one of the league’s top quarterbacks. At the time, though, it represented a reversion to the norm after the aberration that was Watson’s deal.
After the terms of Murray’s extension were announced, Los Angeles Chargers owner Dean Spanos — who was, at the time, one year away from needing to extend Justin Herbert — texted Bidwill to congratulate him.
“Thanks Deno!” Bidwill responded. “These QB deals are getting expensive but we limited the fully guaranteed money and have some pretty good language. Thankfully, we have a QB that’s worth paying.”
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“Your deal helps us for our QB next year,” Spanos replied.
“I think many teams will be happy with it once they have a chance to review,” Bidwill wrote back. “Cleveland really screwed things up, but I was resolved to keep the guaranteed money relatively ‘low.’”
While the NFLPA ultimately lost its lawsuit, that exchange reveals the manner in which contracts play off one another in the NFL — how one team negotiating a favorable deal can help the rest of the league.
It also provides a window into the thinking of Keim and Bidwill, who famously included a clause — which was later removed — in Murray’s contract that he could not play video games while studying film.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: What Cardinals owner, ex-GM privately said about Kyler Murray contract