The Vikings Need Less From Kyler Murray Than You Might Think

We’re doing that thing again. Dreaming our little preseason dreams about what might happen when a one-time explosive quarterback force gone astray teams up with a noted quarterback whisperer (which usually means coach that happened to work with a lot of really good quarterbacks), hungry for his next project. The result is a Texas-sized Gulf of America fireworks show of hype, which almost always misses the point, and, worse, sometimes winds up disappointing on the scale of True Detective, Season 2. Not all dream pairings are worth multiple games, or episodes.

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The Vikings signed Kyler Murray not because he has a late-stage Warren Moon–like stretch of Pro Bowls on the horizon, but because Minnesota has been grasping for the most coveted element in NFL football right now: dependable quarterback play without the disastrous side effects. Murray does not need to-and likely will not-end up being the skillsmaxxed version of the electrifying Air Raid prospect we saw at Oklahoma who won the Heisman Trophy in 2018. He will more than likely be a forced-functional cog in a drastically remade offense that seeks to place the quarterback in more advantageous situations while leading with a run-first mentality that complements the true strength of the team: its defense.

The idea that Murray will create more explosives because he’s more athletic than Sam Darnold-O’Connell’s most recent reclamation-and, thus, unlock some other dimension of skill from a talented receiving corps, suffers from a look at reality. Murray’s scramble rate was about 5.3% in 2023 (two percentage points lower than that of Joshua Dobbs, who took a little more than 600 snaps for the Vikings that year) and was only about 2% higher than Sam Darnold’s in 2024. Murray’s EPA per throw on off-schedule passes, according to SumerSports, has also been below league average since 2020.

Another reason why Murray is an interesting choice that we should maintain a healthy amount of skepticism in: A newly-installed “vertical wide zone” offense, as O’Connell put it, would signal a more intense marriage of the run and the pass. Murray’s play-action numbers have decreased almost every year in the NFL, with a correlation also between pressure percentage and play-action snaps. Murray, according to Sharp Football data, was also one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL last season in turning pressure situations into sacks. Can Murray be the quarterback O’Connell wants him to be, and what did his fairly quick ascension to the starting job say about J.J. McCarthy’s inability to do so? My guess is that naming a starter not even halfway through August means increasing Murray’s reps and comfort level in this scheme.

Of course, as Purple Insider notes, Murray’s passer rating in 2024 was 93.5. The cherry-picked data I’ve spit at you makes it seem like Murray has been awful, when, in reality, of the 45 quarterbacks who have played 1,000 or more snaps since 2020, Murray is almost smack dab in the middle in terms of EPA per play; a tick above Baker Mayfield, Bo Nix, C.J. Stroud and Trevor Lawrence. The Vikings are 31–9 since 2022 when the team has a quarterback posting a 90 rating or better. The issue last season was that it occurred merely six times (and the Vikings were 6–0 during that stretch). O’Connell asked for “baseline” play at the combine out of the prospective starter. His coaching magic will be in coaxing that consistently out of the former No. 1 pick.

As one NFL offensive coordinator put it to me during offseason conversations, we tend to ask why quarterbacks aren’t playing to a certain previously established statistical benchmark when we should be asking why more teams aren’t trying to play their quarterbacks to the totality of their roster. The best example is Jalen Hurts, whose attempts per game went from a staggering 538 in 2023 to just 361 during the team’s Super Bowl season. We didn’t seem to care because Saquon Barkley was leaping over human beings like they were steeplechase props.

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The Vikings have had the second-best defense-and defensive coordinator-in the NFL since 2023, when Brian Flores arrived from the Steelers. And while I have a reason to doubt that some of Flores’s most innovative tricks will survive the great wave of copycats and subsequent offensive adjustments-like his suite of early-down pressures which caught teams trying to keep up analytically and stay ahead of the sticks-there is a reason the Vikings paid him a gargantuan amount of money to stay. There is a reason that physical toughness and the reinvention of the run game have been the true tales of Minnesota’s training camp. There is a reason the team took a major swing on disruptive defensive tackle Caleb Banks in the first round and drafted the only fullback taken in 2026 in the fifth round.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be moments. And perhaps there will come a time when we confuse the phenomenal instances with the idea that Murray has finally blossomed. But my guess is that O’Connell is hoping that the 2026 season will not necessitate much talk about the quarterback position at all. This is the true test of the quarterback whisperer-making the position all but disappear.

This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Vikings Need Less From Kyler Murray Than You Might Think.

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This story was originally published August 11, 2026 at 11:59 AM.