How Kyler Murray Can Save His Future With the Cardinals

The Arizona QB hit the reset button this year, returning under a new coach and coordinator in a season with big draft implications.

Hopefully we get a little better entertainment value from Week 13 than we did Week 12. (For me, the whole weekend sucked, especially Saturday.) They can’t all be home runs …

• There was a quote from Kyler Murray after the Cardinals’ loss to the Rams that I thought was worth pulling out here, as Arizona’s new brass tries to get a good read on Murray as a player, with big decisions at quarterback coming down the pike.

“This is my third game, seventh week of practice, there’s obviously growing pains with this,” Murray said. “It’s my third game, a new scheme, new everything for me. So, I’m not discouraged at all by it. I know we’ll be better because of it, but these are some of the things that we got to go through as part of it.”

A year after tearing his ACL, Murray returned to play in mid-November :: Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports

Murray really isn’t lying. The reality is that the quarterback played in the same sort of offense throughout his career—from Allen High School to Texas A&M to Oklahoma and then to the Cardinals—so the Shanahan-influenced system Drew Petzing has put in was like learning Latin for the quarterback. And to his credit, Murray dove right into it.

The good news for Murray is he does have some control over the situation going forward. If he can play well enough to knock the Cardinals down in the 2024 draft order, that would reduce the chance Arizona will see a quarterback it likes enough to offload Murray.

• One leftover piece from the Panthers’ firing of Frank Reich—and be sure to take a look at Tuesday’s story on owner David Tepper—is the take of one Carolina lieutenant, who told me that he felt like the team hired too big a coaching staff.

The result, he continued, was too many cooks in the kitchen, particularly on offense.

It’s worth considering. Reich came from the Colts. He brought pass-game specialist Parks Frazier with him. Coordinator Thomas Brown came from the Rams. Quarterbacks coach Josh McCown last worked with the Texans in 2020, and was in his first formal foray as a coach. Receivers coach Shawn Jefferson came from Arizona. Tight ends coach John Lilly was hired after three seasons at North Carolina. Line coach James Campen was a Matt Rhule holdover. Running backs coach Duce Staley came from the Lions. Senior assistant Jim Caldwell was last with the Dolphins in ’19.

Only three of them (Frazier, Staley and Caldwell) had worked with Reich before. In Staley’s case, it had been five years since they overlapped with the Eagles. In Caldwell’s case, it had been well over a decade, dating back to when Reich was Caldwell’s receivers coach in Indianapolis.

On paper, that all makes sense. But it’s also a lot of ideas and philosophies being mushed together. That led to an offense that was constantly stuck in the mud, with so many voices in the room and losses that were piling up.

Now, maybe the idea would’ve worked if all those people, a lot of them good coaches, had more time to work together. Obviously, they didn’t get that.

• A situation like Murray’s doesn’t exist for Justin Fields, as the Bears have the 1–10 Panthers’ first-rounder in April. So even if Fields kills it the rest of the year, he’ll have to play well enough down the stretch to convince Chicago to pass on the idea of Caleb Williams or Drake Maye on a rookie deal. It won’t be an easy task.

That said, Fields did take more steps Monday night, particularly in how he handled pressure and how he led the team down the field at the end of the game. His coaches have always said he just needs to play more. Injuries have interrupted Fields’s ability to do that in spots over the last couple of years, but incremental progress is coming. Will there be enough of it by the end of the year? It’s hard to say.

• I thought one of the best moments of Week 12 was Packers coach Matt LaFleur handing the gameball from Green Bay’s Thanksgiving win over Detroit to edge rusher Rashan Gary. Gary registered three sacks on the field where he tore his ACL a year ago, and it was clear that the postgame moment between coach and player was emotional for more folks in that locker room than just those two.

I asked LaFleur about it a few hours later—and about Gary, a player who is the heart and soul of the Packers’ defense, the same way Aaron Jones is for the offense.

“I can think about a year prior, just being with him postgame with all the doctors around and he’s sitting in one of those back rooms in a locker with his knee in a brace,” LaFleur says. “He’s sobbing—understandably so. Anybody that pours their heart and soul into something, and then to have something as devastating as an ACL injury cut your season short, it was tough. It was a tough moment. It was a moment that will be embedded in my mind forever, just the pain that he felt.

“He was apologizing to me. I was like, ‘Dude, it’s not your fault.’ My heart broke for him. Then to see him come back to this place, the same building and have the day that he had, two forced fumbles, three sacks and obviously has a huge impact on the game, that was pretty cool. He cares a lot. You can see the emotion in that setting and also just how he plays the game. That definitely meant a lot to him.

“It meant a lot to everybody because everybody knows what he’s about. He’s about all the right things. He gives his all every time he goes out on the field.”

Like LaFleur said, pretty cool all the way around.

• Three-time All-Pro linebacker Shaq Leonard is on the circuit this week—he’s set to visit the Cowboys and Eagles—and the simplest question, really, is how we got here with a once-great, 28-year-old player suddenly available at the November-December turn.

Leonard visited the Cowboys on Tuesday :: Jenna Watson/USA Today Network

The answer, too, is simple. It’s the injuries. Leonard initially hurt his ankle in 2021 and subsequently hurt his back and needed surgery. He gutted it out in ’21, then hardly played in ’22 after the surgery. He wasn’t the same coming back this season; some believe he’s still hurt, and the resulting downturn in his performance led to his release.

Leonard can still play. But expectations will have to be managed.

“He just doesn’t have the same explosiveness and movement he had before,” says one rival defensive coach. “If he does go to Dallas or Philly, he’s not a liability, he’s just not going to make the same plays he did in the past.”

“He is no longer explosive,” says an AFC exec who’s studied him. “His change of direction and bend have declined. His lower body just looks like that of an older player. But he still has length, straight line range and instincts.”

• The Browns and Vikings now face interesting decisions at quarterback.

Both have starters (Deshaun Watson and Kirk Cousins, respectively) who are out for the year. Both had rookies they rolled out there that got hurt (Jaren Hall for Minnesota, Dorian Thompson-Robinson for Cleveland). Both had veterans that hit harder times (Joshua Dobbs for the Vikings, PJ Walker for the Browns). So now each has a different veteran in its pocket (Nick Mullens in Minnesota and Joe Flacco in Cleveland) who hasn’t played yet to potentially turn to.

Both teams would be playoff teams if the season ended now. Would you go with another new quarterback this late in the season? It’ll be fascinating to see how Kevin O’Connell and Kevin Stefanski handle the week.

• Given the chance to take back calling James Bradberry “trash” ahead of this week’s Niners vs. Eagles NFC title game rematch, San Francisco receiver Deebo Samuel stood by his previous comments. “I don’t regret nothing I said,” Samuel said.

My take? Good. And not because I think Bradberry’s trash. I definitely don’t. I just like the fact that we have a little vitriol in what’s become a good rivalry.

• Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald should start to get a little notoriety and maybe some heat as a head coaching candidate, with how Baltimore’s defense is coming together.

Macdonald’s unit has held three of its last six opponents to 10 or fewer points, and those three games were against pretty good groups (Lions, Seahawks and Chargers). Now, of course, it’s going to be tough for any defensive coach to land a job this year, with a backlog of qualified candidates on that side of the ball and some owners set on hiring offensive coaches instead. But Macdonald should at least be in that mix.

• I do appreciate Mike Tomlin answering questions about Diontae Johnson head-on.

You’ll notice Tomlin didn’t excuse Johnson’s lack of effort. The coach is going to let Johnson answer for his own actions, which to me is the perfect way to handle it. In case you missed it, here’s why the questions were raised in the first place. 

Not sure how anyone would defend Diontae Johnson's effort here. https://t.co/Er9XZZdXys

— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) November 26, 2023

• I’d say any heat on Deion Sanders as an NFL coaching candidate has cooled of late.