Kyler Murray signing with the Minnesota Vikings on a one-year deal is one of those NFL fever dream moments that creates a subplot that would have been unfathomable even half a year ago. The former No. 1 overall draft pick joins Kevin O’Connell and the Vikings — who are fresh off a disastrous debut campaign for their 2024 first-round selection J.J. McCarthy, and the recent firing of their general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah — in a union that still feels strange to think of.
It’s also a marriage that I like the more I’ve pieced together the combination of an undersized, shotgun-heavy, pocket-breaking quarterback with one of the more traditional attack play-callers. And I like it more than just from a morbid curiosity sense.
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To start, Murray is way better than McCarthy. Even at Murray’s absolute worst, that is an objective fact. Murray’s worst is also better than Vikings backup Carson Wentz’s play this decade, and Murray has been better than a lot of quarterbacks throughout his career while wilting away with an Arizona Cardinals organization that’s on to another head coach and constantly rates among the league’s worst in the NFLPA report cards. Call of Duty release date memes or not, Murray has been a firmly league-average or better starter throughout his career.
Kyler Murray’s size and play have their advantages — and limitations
He is an imperfect player. Much has always been made about his height, but he actually has solid bulk and is of course a great athlete. Since entering the NFL in 2019, Murray ranks first in QB hit rate (sacks + knockdowns) with just a 9.4% mark. He has had some injuries crop up, but he does a good job of getting rid of the ball (sometimes a bit too often) and avoids hits and sacks more often than is perceived. Murray’s sack rate for his career is right at league average, about the same as Kirk Cousins. and he also has some creation ability to help open up plays beyond the concepts called.
Kyler Murray has a chance to turn around his career in Minnesota like Sam Darnold did. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
(Stephen Maturen via Getty Images)
There are drawbacks to Murray’s size and play style, though. Murray’s height limits the areas of the field he can comfortably operate as a thrower, and he can bail from the pocket too often when he is not comfortable with the concept or defensive disguise. He’s also long been in shotgun-heavy offenses, from high school ball to college to even the NFL under his first Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury. Murray has primarily operated in offenses steeped in traditional Air Raid principles (i.e. shotgun almost always). Murray had the highest rate of shotgun snaps among quarterbacks from 2019-2022, hovering around 90% of the Cardinals’ snaps on early downs. From 2023-2025 under offensive coordinator Drew Petzing, it hovered around 70% of the time on early downs.
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How will Kyler Murray fit into Kevin O’Connell’s Vikings offense?
What makes Murray’s fit with the Vikings so fascinating is how his style will merge with O’Connell’s modus operandi: getting under center and chucking it. Since O’Connell became Minnesota’s head coach in 2022, 56.4% of the Vikings’ early down snaps have been under center, which ranks second over that time. They also rank second in the amount of play action from under center they ran over that period. Murray has had 180 snaps of under-center play-action concepts since he’s entered the NFL. The Vikings have averaged 164 per season since 2022.
O’Connell likes to attack vertically with play fakes to not only try and draw up defenders, but to also vary up protections so his quarterbacks can stand in the pocket and attack downfield. Cousins was a tough player willing to stand and deliver on throws, even if he lacked the high-end arm or athleticism to be considered an upper-tier quarterback. Sam Darnold then came in and played like Cousins with Sam Raimi directing him.
Murray, meanwhile, had a few plays of operating on these concepts, often on the move on bootlegs and at times bailing from the pocket a bit too early. But there are flashes of excellent throws from the pocket by Murray after he turns his back to the defense. O’Connell has seldom run play action out of the shotgun, so this will have to be incorporated in Minnesota.
Murray is best working to the outside and down the field. He has a nice knack for layering throws with touch, but is comfortable doing it more when he can throw out in space on things like crossers and overs and outbreaking routes. His partnership with Marvin Harrison Jr. was often frustrating because of Harrison’s role in the offense features in-breaking dig routes that Murray would neglect to throw to at all. (Murray ranks 40th out of 45 qualifying quarterbacks since entering the NFL in 2019 in throws of 10-22 yards and between the numbers.)
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Here is Murray’s target heat map from the 2024 and 2025 seasons, with a handy circle placed to focus on over the middle of the field. Notice the blue incomplete dots down the sideline and the lack of dots over the middle.
And here is Sam Darnold’s heat map in 2024 when he was the Vikings’ starting quarterback:
Darnold is a fellow talented but imperfect quarterback who excelled and used it to launch to even greater success in Seattle this past season. He has always been willing to attack the middle, sometimes to his own detriment, but that willingness is what made Shanahan (and Kubiak) coaches so fond of him operating in their under-center, play-action, chuck-it-between-the-hashes-like-there’s-no-tomorrow offense.
Murray also went from chucking deep go balls to becoming more of an underneath thrower under Petzing. Sometimes frustratingly so. He went from 33.3% of his throws traveling 10 or more air yards in 2021 (which ranked 10th that season), to just 26.7% last season (which ranked 37th). His chemistry with Cardinals tight end Trey McBride is a part of that, but perhaps the rest of the Arizona receiving crops, which featured plenty of size but perhaps not a ton of deep speed, limited some of that. But Murray was a great deep ball thrower earlier in his career, even if the routes he likes to throw can be limited in scope.
Kyler Murray’s play in Arizona was better than it seemed
Murray’s underlying statistics, even with his imperfections, have still pointed to an effective (if limited) player.
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Murray ranks 17th in dropback success rate since entering the NFL. His 46% rate is the exact same as Justin Herbert. It’s above names like Aaron Rodgers, Baker Mayfield, Jalen Hurts, Trevor Lawrence, Sam Darnold, Russell Wilson, C.J. Stroud and Bo Nix. He ranks 18th in EPA per play. He’s an effective scrambler and doesn’t actually scramble as much as people perceive, although there is an uptick when he isn’t comfortable with what’s going on around him.
He’s touched borderline top-10 play at the position (an arbitrary thing, but you get the idea). But he’s done it in two wildly different offenses and his improvement for most of 2024 was a fun subplot for the season. He ranked 13th in EPA, eighth in success rate and ninth in QBR (a career high) in an offense that asked him to do more traditional operation at the position than he had ever done in his career.
The 2025 Cardinals, though, completely fell off the rails. Every position group got hit with injuries, the running back room especially so. The running game fell off a cliff with a regression in health and overall play following the departure of offensive line coach Klayton Adams, going from one of the most explosive run games in 2024 to 30th in 2025 and bottoming out with a 28th ranking in FTN’s rushing DVOA ranking. No wonder head coach Jonathan Gannon was melting down like he looked at the Ark of the Covenant.
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#QBWinz is a tired concept, but the Cardinals haven’t exactly been soaring when Murray hasn’t been on the field. Their record was 38-48-1 with him starting and 5-25 without him. He now goes to a team that somehow finished above the Lions in the standings despite having a different horse of the quarterback apocalypse playing each week.
The Vikings’ run game actually improved quite a bit last season. Minnesota ranked sixth in early down rushing success rate on running back runs in 2025 as well as 13th in rushing DVOA, the highest under O’Connell, and now they add Murray’s legs as a dimension for the offense.
Marriage of Kyler Murray, Vikings can be mutually beneficial
Murray is a player a team can win with, or get hot enough with to go on a run in the playoffs. It’s an imperfect marriage, one born out of desperation between both player and team. It’s one I’m absolutely fascinated in seeing unfold.
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O’Connell has a preferred style, but he molds and mends the offenses around his quarterbacks. O’Connell and Murray will both have to grow comfortable with new things. And I think the desperation, for lack of a better word, of their situations might lead to something interesting and potentially better than par. For a team that had a winning record despite poor QB production last season, an average quarterback with games of plus and minus performances can help stave off regression elsewhere.
Murray is a completely different style than one who has played in Minnesota lately, but he has some synergistic overlap (oh, god, what are those words) that are intriguing. Again, it’s imperfect, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be good. And when paired with a defense that played like a top-five unit to close the season (pending draft reinforcements), and with Justin Jefferson (oh yeah, remember him?), Jordan Addison (pending off-field issues) and a run game and offensive line that should at least be average or better (pending health with those groups), I think this can be more of a fruitful marriage, even if it is two flavors that seem like an odd mix.
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Also, the contract. Murray’s hit on the Vikings cap is just $1.3 million this season. It’s a one-year deal; a mercenary agreement that gives Murray incentive to use the 2026 season as a launching pad and the Vikings the ability to compete with another new face slated to start behind center, whose salary cap hit is the size of an early third-round rookie.
If Murray plays like an even league-average starter, something he can easily do, this has a chance to pay off for both parties. Every team in the NFC North is in flux this season. Murray allows the Vikings to keep their hat in the ring.