There is more to come from Kyler Murray
For eight weeks last season, Kyler Murray was as good as any quarterback in the NFL -- then things cratered. On the hows, the whys, and what comes next.
For eight weeks last season, Kyler Murray was less a professional quarterback and more a footballing supernova.
Sometimes you can just tell a player has made a mini leap. You can see it. You can feel it. Over that stretch of the season, Murray vaulted from a fun-to-watch, he’ll-put-it-together-someday quarterback into the league’s upper tier.
Then something switched. Murray got hurt. He missed time. The Cardinals changed up their offense – from a spread-out, receiver-based concoction into a more balanced, condensed, get-a-tight-end-on-the-field set-up. As has become custom throughout his career, Kliff Kingsbury’s offense flatlined – to almost memeable proportions.
There is a whole stack of reasons and theories: The Cardinals offense becoming too predictable (Kingsbury, oddly, taking stuff away during the season rather than adding more in); injuries; wear and tear on Murray, making him a lesser off-script threat; an offensive line that could not keep up as the season went along. All are true to some degree.
Whatever the specifics, the numbers are jarring:
As the Cards changed the profile of their offense, the whole machine fell apart. Kingsbury shifted to tighter and heavier sets, ditching a league-high 10 percent of ten personnel usage (1 back, 0 tight ends) and instead banking on Zach Ertz to be the midseason difference-maker – who the Cardinals acquired from the Eagles prior to the trade deadline.
It was a dud. Things were slower and more ponderous. As the offensive line nose-dived, Kingsbury and co. banked on more vertical concepts, an odd contradiction.
Murray’s play tanked, too. He missed basic throws. The same electricity that defined the early portion of the season was there, but he started to miss the basic layups, relying too much on the out-of-structure sorcery that had served as the cherry on top rather than the base of the offense early in the year. Over the final seven games – regular season and postseason, after he returned from injury – Murray ranked 23rd in the EPA+CPOE composite, which measures the value of a play and how much the quarterback can be deemed responsible for the value. Murray fell from the ranks of the elite (3rd in the league) to the class of not-very-good, sitting behind the likes of Jared Goff, Drew Lock, and something called Tim Boyle, which sounds like a Victorian-era medical practice.
Murray was and is far from the problem. Heading into next season, he’s the only certainty in Arizona: the offensive line is shaky; the skill positions leave a lot to be desired; the defensive front is weakened, having a compound effect on what is needed and what will be expected at the second level and in the secondary. Murray, in many ways, is just that little bit too good to cost coach Kill Kingsbury and GM Steve Keim their jobs — he is almost singularly responsible for the pair receiving bumper four-year contracts.
But that’s not to say Murray cannot improve, which is both nitpicking and terrifying— at least for those trying to slow the quarterback down.
One area for growth: His play vs. the blitz.
Player development is not linear. skills and traits do not work independently. One skill unlocks another, and one skill might unlock everything.
Not all skills are created equal, either. Some have knock-on effects. Become a quarterback who is immune to the blitz, and suddenly the defense is more predictable. Tack on a running dimension to your game, and now the defense is left with a bind: they want to get depth in their defense, but how much depth is too much depth, gifting open field to a dynamic running threat like Murray. So the defense tries to pinch up to control the quarterback run, and then there is grass in behind for a deadly deep-shot thrower like Murray to take those shots. Adding a new dimension to his game early in 2021 offered a fresh perspective to his whole game.
The magic of Murray is that he hits atypical spots routinely. He hits the low percentage parts of the field at an outrageously high clip.
ProFootballFocus charted Murray with 46 (!) big-time throws last season. Murray finished the fifteen games he started with a 7.9 percent Big Time Throw percentage, comfortably the highest in the league – and one of only two quarterbacks (JAMEIS!) to break the seven-percentage point threshold. Winston hit 7.1% in seven games; Murray nudged up against eight bleeping percent in fifteen games. I’m not entirely sure what goes into charting that metric, but it certainly sounds awesome.
Here’s the thing: Murray is great against every look. He torched it all last season. Throwing vs. static looks: Easy. Beating the rotator: Childs play. Getting the ball out hot vs. pressure: Done. Manipulating the defense with his eyes: I got you. Moving and creating on his own: That’s where the fun begins. But rising into the ranks of the Do Not Blitz brigade made him even more lethal as a deep-ball thrower. Teams were either trying to get home, vacating space for him to puncture behind, or they were sagging off in static looks, trying to keep eyes on the quarterback in case he transitioned to a runner – Murray became one of the best defensive manipulators right out of the gate, using the zone-dense, eyes-on-the-quarterback style against defenders, manipulating them with his eyes:
During the opening span of the season – if you remove the hokey Texans game, in which Houston brought a single blitz, to generate a more representative sample – Murray was blitzed on 23.3 percent of his dropbacks. And he shredded the thing, with his arm and legs. Murray averaged 11.5 yards per attempt, completing 77.6 percent of his passes.
Murray had refined his game. Tennessee and Cleveland blitzed Murray on over a third of his dropbacks. Beating the blitz isn’t difficult for good quarterbacks. When the opposition sends an extra defender, that leaves a receiver open – or it means single coverage across the board. Defenses rarely blitz the best of the best because they understand the likes of Brady, Rodgers, and Wilson can decode and find an open target easily. Both the Titans and Browns (and the Packers in high leverage spots) tried to blitz Murray off the field. He had been a so-so thrower vs. the blitz throughout his college career and early life in the NFL. But over that initial eight-week stretch, his game took the next logical evolution: Something clicked, and he started to punish teams for sending pressure.
For eight weeks, he was the best thrower vs. pressure in the league.
When Murray returned from his injury, however, as opposing DCs gathered more intel on his development, the Cardinals’ scheme, and their evolving style, they did not back off. They didn’t blitz Murray less. They blitzed him more.
What changed? Two things: The profile of blitzes, and Murray’s reaction to them.