The Kyler Murray Era

 

Kyler Murray is a Minnesota Viking, and I have a lot of thoughts.

Let’s start with Murray himself. I’m going to get a bit negative as this goes along, so let me be clear from the beginning that I do believe the Vikings just got the best quarterback available on the market this offseason. Murray is a phenomenal athlete with a strong arm who has been a bit erratic but typically is somewhere between the 10^th and 20^th best quarterback in the league. This is the sort of profile that has been earning quarterbacks contracts worth $30+ million a year, and the Vikings got him for the veteran minimum, making him instantly one of the five best bargains at the position in the league.

Murray does a lot of things well, but he also has clear limitations. His short stature means that he has trouble seeing the middle of the field, and the rash of injuries he’s suffered over his career have made him skittish in the pocket. He’ll bail early at any sign of pressure, and he has a tendency to fade away on throws, leading to inaccuracy issues on deeper targets. Despite his arm strength, he’s consistently performed as a bottom 5 quarterback on targets in the intermediate range of the field.

There is a way to build an offense around a quarterback like this, and Murray does enough other things well that he can make it work. An ideal offense for him would look a lot like the one he ran with Kliff Kingsbury the first four years of his career. Spread the field out, let him operate in shotgun making quick pre-snap reads and getting the ball out in a hurry. He is smart and accurate when making these underneath throws, and he’s creative enough with his athleticism to make plays if these initial reads aren’t there.

If a team wanted to build an offense this way, they could do a lot worse than Murray. The questions I have are less about him on his own, and more about how he’ll pair with Kevin O’Connell.

Since the Vikings hired O’Connell, their offenses have had a few key trademarks. They operate under center more than almost any other team in the league, leaning on an attack that blends condensed formations and play action to engineer separation down the field. They are heavy on seven-step drops and long developing routes, with the aim of generating explosive plays down the sidelines and over the middle of the field.

You know, all the stuff I said Murray doesn’t do well.

If you were designing an offense to be the worst possible fit for Murray, it would look an awful lot like O’Connell’s. And if you were designing a quarterback to be the worst possible fit in O’Connell’s offense, it would look a lot like Murray.

Something has to give, and the general assumption seems to be that O’Connell will adapt his offense to fit Murray’s skills. I have some skepticism—O’Connell has shown an unwillingness to adapt in the past, such as this past year when he continued to call deep shots with an offensive line that was missing multiple starters for most of the season—but even if the Vikings do overhaul their offensive scheme this offseason, there will be other downsides.

Changing the scheme to play to the strengths of the quarterback makes a lot of sense, except if by doing so you’re minimizing the strengths of your other players. In Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison the Vikings have two of the best receivers in the league at creating separation on deep routes, but also two players who can sometimes struggle with press coverage. In the past defenses had to be wary about how they took advantage of this. Pressing these receivers can disrupt the timing of routes, but that’s not as big a deal on longer-developing concepts where they have time to get open anyway. And if they are able to win at the line, the result can be a massive play that makes this strategy too costly to risk.

That calculus changes in a Murray-style offense. Timing is much more critical on the slants and hitches he excels at, and he doesn’t have the consistency as a down the field thrower to punish defenders for failing at the line. Jefferson is a good enough player that he’ll be able to make things work, but he probably won’t be able to hit the same heights he could in a scheme more designed to suit his talents.

There are similar issues with the running game. The Vikings love to run a scheme that utilizes multiple tight ends and under center rushes, and players they’ve acquired like Jordan Mason and Josh Oliver will have less value in a scheme that spreads the field and operates out of shotgun. Murray’s value with his legs can make up for this, but you also have to be worried about how much they can actually utilize that, given his injury history.

I think ultimately the Vikings will settle into some middle-ground offensively, where they are better than the mess they were last year but not as dynamic as the talent on the field suggests they should be. I also think we’ll see a few games with JJ McCarthy at quarterback next year, either due to injury or because the issues on offense are severe enough that O’Connell decides to abort the Murray experiment. I don’t buy that there is a genuine preseason competition between the two, but I think Murray’s leash could be pretty short.

All that said, if the defense sustains its level of play it should be enough to bump the Vikings up to 10 or 11 wins and get them into the mix for playoff contention. And this is where I want to step back and address where my true pessimism about the Murray signing comes from, which is what it means about the Vikings’ big picture goals as a franchise.

Before O’Connell was hired, the Vikings went through a decade-long period that was best defined by a dogged fixation on the present with little consideration for the future. Their goal was to put the best team they could on the field every single year, a plan that pretty consistently produced between 7 and 11 wins.

This was most evident in their approach to the quarterback situation. After the Teddy Bridgewater pick failed, they addressed the position with a series of veteran bandaids that did just enough to keep them afloat. When Bridgewater went down they traded a first round pick for Sam Bradford. When Bradford got hurt, they rolled into Case Keenum. When they wanted to move on from Keenum, they signed Kirk Cousins. And when they couldn’t find anything better out on the street, they kept kicking the Cousins can forward for six years that resulted in two playoff appearances and one playoff win.

This approach was driven by head coach Mike Zimmer and GM Rick Spielman, but it also filtered down from ownership. The Wilfs are not interested in rebuilding. They want a competitive team every single year, even if “competitive” ends up being a fairly loose term.

When O’Connell was hired alongside former GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, they managed to convince the ownership to try a different approach. Not a complete teardown, but a “competitive rebuild”, which would focus on adding veteran talent while targeting a cheap rookie quarterback that they hoped they could slide into the machine. This has been done successfully in the past, most notably by the Kansas City Chiefs, who let Alex Smith walk for an unproven and raw first round pick named Patrick Mahomes.

And it might have worked in Minnesota too. They just got the wrong quarterback. This is the downside of this approach. Because quarterback scouting remains maybe the hardest thing in football, and there are very few young quarterbacks that carry no possibility of failure. (The only recent ones that come to mind are Joe Burrow and Trevor Lawrence, and they both went first overall.)

Failure is an essential risk of the process. What really defines a team in the long-term isn’t whether they fail, but how they react to the failure. In 2013 the Bills spent a first round pick on EJ Manuel. That didn’t work out, so in 2018 they drafted Josh Allen. In 2021 the Patriots drafted Mac Jones. Three years later they took Drake Maye. The Bears failed twice, with Mitch Trubisky in 2017 and then Justin Fields in 2021. So in 2025 they took Caleb Williams, and now they appear set to be competitive for the next decade.

Drafting a quarterback should ultimately be a volume strategy. Because it only has to work once to make it all worth it. Yes, there is a risk you end up in a Jets-like cycle where you get failure after failure after failure. But most teams eventually do get it right.

This is what bothers me the most about the Murray signing. Because on the surface it appears to be the Vikings taking the wrong lesson from the failure of McCarthy. Rather than setting themselves up in the best position to try again, they are scrambling to find their way back to mediocrity.

I can’t see inside Kevin O’Connell’s head. It’s possible he is genuinely enthused about having Murray as a quarterback. But based on everything I said above, and based on every other quarterback he’s brought into the Vikings, I would be surprised. This feels more like something he feels forced into, because if he doesn’t find a way to get back into playoff contention he won’t be the head coach of the Vikings in 2027. This once again feels like something trickling down from ownership. They saw the 2025 season as an unacceptable outcome, and they will do everything in their power to prevent it from happening again.

Murray is only on a one-year contract, and the future after that remains very murky. How well does he have to play for them to sign him to an extension? How well does he have to play before they find themselves in a bidding war for his services? If he moves on after 2026, where do they go from there? Do they try to find a different guy to keep them afloat year by year? Maybe Mac Jones in 2027, Daniel Jones in 2028? Drop Bryce Young or Jaxson Dart in there somewhere along the way?

Right now the message that ownership is sending is that any risk of failure is not acceptable. But nearly every top quarterback in the league had some risk. Patrick Mahomes came out of a gimmicky offense playing a reckless style that almost always ended in disaster in the NFL. Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson completed less than 60% of their passes in college. Drake Maye and Caleb Williams were phenomenally gifted talents who needed to struggle through a tough rookie season before they finally figured out how to put it together.

The Vikings have no interest in anything like that. All they want is another Kirk Cousins, to keep them from ever feeling like there’s anything actually at risk.