Let’s start with this: up until today, I was 100% in the camp of “Keep Kyler and sign him to a mega deal.”
The idea of voluntarily re-entering the quarterback wasteland and trying to talk yourself into Drew Lock or Mitchell Trubisky or Sam Darnold was crazy to me.
And now this.
Kyler Murray has no-showed the Cardinals voluntary workout. JJ Watt is there. James Conner is there. AJ Green is there. Kyler Murray is not.
Even if this was planned weeks ago and has nothing to do with Kyler’s current contractual status, it’s still a red flag for me.
For four months, Kyler Murray has headr the very public and private questions about his leadership and maturity from DeAndre Hopklins, AJ Green, the Cardinals front office, media reports and fans. His response was to shrug.
It would’ve been very easy for Kyler to hop on a quick flight, do some workouts with his teammates, grab a dinner, have a human conversation, give a few media interviews talking about starting out on the right foot and improving areas he needed to improve with communication and then head back to Texas to be a house cat for a few weeks until the next phase of workouts.
In fact, that’s what most NFL QB’s do. They accept it’s probably not going to be fun but they do it and make the most out of it anyway.
Everyone has some part of their job that is “voluntary” but you know you have to do whether you like it or not. In fact, a big part of leadership is to show up and do the things other people don’t want to do and do them better than anyone else. Lead by example.
Kyler doesn’t seem to care about any of that.
He wants to show up and do the fun stuff; play football games. This is the same QB who publicly complained about how boring the pre-season was while Tom Brady was publicly extolling the virtues of it.
The first three years, we can chalk it up to on the job training. Heading into year 4? This is a feature of Kyler Murray, not a bug.
Its fair to wonder if Kyler will ever understand that in the NFL, no one cares how great of an athlete you are or how awesome you think you are. In the NFL, it’s the guys who do EVERYTHING that matter, not the guys who just do what they want to do.
When you’re an NFL quarterback and face of a franchise, everything matters.
Kyler doesn’t get it and it’s fair to start really asking if he ever will.
If he doesn’t maybe those “Trade Kyler Murray!” people aren’t so crazy after all.