Kyler Murray will be released by the Arizona Cardinals next week. This isn’t surprising news. In fact, the only reason that Murray’s release is noteworthy is because the NFL offseason has been, to this point, so utterly inert. The 2026 draft class is underwhelming, and the UFA pool is even worse. A lot of teams are in desperate need of help at QB, to the point where the San Francisco 49ers can go to the combine and tell other teams, with a straight face, that they want a first-round pick for Mac Jones (no one has yet to take them up on the offer). That makes Kyler Murray officially “intriguing” to the Jets/Steelers/Dolphins/Vikings/Browns of this world.
The problem is that Murray’s entire career, to this point, has been far more about intrigue than production.
Let’s go back. It’s 2019 and the Cardinals have decided that one year of Josh Rosen at QB is all the Josh Rosen they’ll ever need. So with the No. 1 overall pick that April, they take a mulligan and draft Murray. He goes on to win Rookie of the Year in his first season. The following spring, then-Arizona GM Steve Keim finds himself the beneficiary of Bill O’Brien’s idiocy and gets Texans WR DeAndre Hopkins, then in the prime of his career, for next to nothing. Suddenly the Cardinals, who haven’t won a title since 1947, have a franchise QB plus a top-level weapon to pair with him. The following November, Americans stranded by COVID get to witness those moves bear tasty fruit:
Hopkins would finish that season with 115 catches for 1,407 yards and six touchdowns. In theory, things would only get better from there. The illusory championship window was now wide open for Arizona. Pam Bondi testily informed Congress that the Intrigue Market was now well above 50,000.
Little did fans realize that would be the best season that Murray and Hopkins would ever play together, and by a substantial margin. Hopkins only lasted two more years in the literal desert before being cast off into the proverbial one. Meanwhile, Murray’s relationship with the Cardinals organization began to deteriorate the second they inked the QB to a fat contract extension in the summer of 2022. You might remember that contract extension, specifically the clause that Keim put into it mandating that Murray study at least four hours of game tape, on his own, every week. The implication was clear: that Murray was lazy, and that he got off on playing Call of Duty more than he did playing professional football.
Now the Arizona Cardinals are a breathtakingly stupid organization, and it was the breathtakingly stupid of them to slander their own QB as a malcontent right after giving him $160 million in guarantees. But the label stuck anyway, with fans and media members zeroing in on Kyler’s every loss, every injury, and every frowny face thereafter.
Kyler Murray is only 28 years old. That’s mildly surprising if you’ve been following his career this whole time, but wholly explainable by the fact that he’s plied his trade in Arizona, where quarterbacks age more quickly than a banana from Safeway. Murray is, by far, the best QB the Arizona Cardinals have ever drafted. And yet his career with them will have lasted just seven seasons, with the Cards eating $38.6 million in dead cap money this coming season to be rid of him. In fact, the team memory-holed Murray in the back half of 2025, just to get him out of their faces a little early. As a treat. It’s a demise as sad as it is inexplicable. The Hail Murray was supposed to the beginning of something, not the apex of it.
If I’m making it sound like Murray is purely the victim of circumstance here, let’s go ahead and acknowledge that he’s been a horribly inconsistent pro quarterback. He’s never thrown for 30 TDs in a season. He’s never won a playoff game. He’s only played one full season since 2020. He sucks under pressure, and often has to scamper around for minutes at a time in the backfield before getting a pass off. He’s proven strangely incapable of establishing an on-field rapport with his best wideout, be it Hopkins or recent draftee Marvin Harrison Jr. And yeah, he’s probably not that fun at parties.
But he is cheap. Like Russell Wilson back in 2024, Murray’s contract contained offset language, which means that his 2026 salary will be paid almost entirely by his former team and not his new one. Thus, any team can sign him for a one-year deal at the league minimum ($1.3 million), making him the potential thrifting find of the 2026 offseason.
With the recent success of reclamation projects like Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold, there’ll be a market for Murray’s services. Teams like the Jets and Vikings, both of whom have already been linked to the former Heisman winner, could take a risk-free flyer on him and end up with a serviceable bridge QB, and maybe even a late-blooming franchise QB if they get lucky. Maybe those teams can unlock Murray’s potential in ways that the Cardinals seemingly refused to. Maybe they can get him to click with a top wideout, get rid of the ball faster, and step out of bounds when a linebacker double his weight is about to ruin his shit. Maybe they can get him into birdwatching instead of PlayStation. Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. This is maybe season in the NFL, and a freed Kyler Murray offers more maybes per dollar than any other available QB out there. He’s intriguing, even if he promises nothing beyond that.
