What do we make of Kyler Murray? He’s really small, but he also looks like he’s really good. It’s now looking very likely that he’ll be one of the first two players chosen in the draft.
What do we make of Kyler Murray? He’s really small, but he also looks like he’s really good. It’s now looking very likely that he’ll be one of the first two players chosen in the draft.
The size is a concern. At best he’s 5-foot-10 and 205 pounds. He looks like he might be an inch shorter and 10 pounds lighter. He was chugging water before they weighed him at the combine.
But Murray is really mobile and really accurate. He put up eye-popping numbers at Oklahoma, and I think a lot of those skills will translate. With him, I don’t see a quarterback who just happens to be at the helm of a really good offense. I see him making a lot of plays and fitting the ball into a lot of tighter windows.
While Murray is tiny, I don’t see arm strength as an issue at all. On three of his long touchdowns to Marquise Brown, the ball traveled 55-57 yards in the air to get to him. I can’t say with certainty, but I would guess that most NFL starters last year didn’t have a completion all year where the ball traveled 50 yards in the air. Murray’s arm is fine.
For all quarterbacks who’ve been chosen in the first round, we’ve got their stats from their final college season in a sortable database. Murray averaged more yards per attempt last year than all of them. (Only Mayfield is within a yard of him). And lots of downfield throws. Murray averaged 16.8 yards per completion last year, the most by any quarterback this century.
(Fun fact, and in fairness I will point out that if you go back into the ‘90s, you can find two who averaged even more yards per completion and both were spectacularly bad at the pro level – Ryan Leaf and Akili Smith.)
But Murray looks really good. If you want to rank them by passer rating (and I’ll use the NFL formula – I’m not even sure how they calculate the college version) he comes in at No. 2, just behind Mayfield.
| FIRST-ROUND QUARTERBACKS (last 10 years) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Player | Pct | Yards | TD | Int | Rating |
| 2018 | Baker Mayfield | 71% | 4,627 | 43 | 6 | 137.9 |
| 2019 | Kyler Murray | 69% | 4,361 | 42 | 7 | 137.2 |
| 2012 | Robert Griffin III | 72% | 4,293 | 37 | 6 | 130.1 |
| 2015 | Marcus Mariota | 68% | 4,454 | 42 | 4 | 128.4 |
| 2011 | Cam Newton | 66% | 2,854 | 30 | 7 | 124.9 |
| 2019 | Dwayne Haskins | 70% | 4,831 | 50 | 8 | 123.2 |
| 2014 | Teddy Bridgewater | 71% | 3,970 | 31 | 4 | 120.3 |
| 2012 | Andrew Luck | 71% | 3,517 | 37 | 10 | 118.0 |
| 2014 | Johnny Manziel | 70% | 4,114 | 37 | 13 | 116.4 |
| 2009 | Mark Sanchez | 66% | 3,207 | 34 | 10 | 113.0 |
| 2010 | Tim Tebow | 68% | 2,895 | 21 | 5 | 112.7 |
| 2016 | Paxton Lynch | 67% | 3,776 | 28 | 4 | 110.6 |
| 2017 | Mitchell Trubisky | 68% | 3,748 | 30 | 6 | 110.5 |
| 2016 | Jared Goff | 64% | 4,719 | 43 | 13 | 109.8 |
| 2014 | Blake Bortles | 68% | 3,581 | 25 | 9 | 109.6 |
| 2012 | Brandon Weeden | 72% | 4,727 | 37 | 13 | 109.6 |
| 2017 | Patrick Mahomes | 66% | 5,052 | 41 | 10 | 108.5 |
| 2016 | Carson Wentz | 63% | 1,651 | 17 | 4 | 106.5 |
| 2013 | EJ Manuel | 68% | 3,397 | 23 | 10 | 104.3 |
| 2017 | Deshaun Watson | 67% | 4,593 | 41 | 17 | 102.3 |
| 2009 | Matthew Stafford | 61% | 3,459 | 25 | 10 | 101.7 |
| 2018 | Josh Rosen | 63% | 3,756 | 26 | 10 | 98.8 |
| 2018 | Lamar Jackson | 59% | 3,660 | 27 | 10 | 98.0 |
| 2018 | Sam Darnold | 63% | 4,143 | 26 | 13 | 97.4 |
| 2015 | Jameis Winston | 65% | 3,907 | 25 | 18 | 93.2 |
| 2011 | Christian Ponder | 62% | 2,044 | 20 | 8 | 93.0 |
| 2010 | Sam Bradford | 57% | 562 | 2 | 0 | 92.8 |
| 2009 | Josh Freeman | 59% | 2,945 | 20 | 8 | 91.8 |
| 2012 | Ryan Tannehill | 62% | 3,744 | 29 | 15 | 89.2 |
| 2018 | Josh Allen | 56% | 1,812 | 16 | 6 | 87.5 |
| 2011 | Blaine Gabbert | 63% | 3,186 | 16 | 9 | 86.2 |
| 2011 | Jake Locker | 55% | 2,265 | 17 | 9 | 82.5 |
To me, Murray has shown enough potential that I think he needs to be selected early. He very easily could be another Mayfield-type quarterback, and that’s what so many teams are desperately trying to find right now. For fantasy purposes, Murray might even be better than Mayfield in that he’s also an elite scrambling threat. He ran for 1,001 yards and 12 TDs last year.
There’s risk in taking quarterbacks early, of course. Some of these first-round passers don’t pan out. But quarterback is the most important position in the game, so there’s also a huge risk in possibly missing out on a franchise-type guy. Teams are kicking themselves now for letting Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson slip to 10th and 12th in the 2017 draft.
I understand that Charley Casserly ripped Murray yesterday, saying that he turned off teams in interviews at the draft – that he isn’t a leader and was terrible on the grease board. But I’m not putting any weight in those comments for now; they were all made off the record by teams and agents potentially hoping to push him down.
When Casserly was an NFL general manager, he used two top-5 picks on quartebacks and missed badly on both of them – Heath Shuler and David Carr.
—Ian Allan