A grumpy Kyler Murray is a good Kyler Murray
Kyler Murray bit his tongue so hard and so often after last Sunday’s loss to the Dolphins it’s a wonder he didn’t land on this week’s injury report.
The Cardinals quarterback was angry, frustrated and in no mood to give expansive answers to questions asked by the heads in Zoom boxes.
How do you process the 34-31 loss? he was asked. It took Murray 19 seconds of pausing, thinking and tongue clucking to answer, nearly twice the time it
would take to run the length of a football field.
“Just got to be better,” he finally said. It went on like that for another three minutes or so and ended with Murray being asked what was upsetting him the most.
“Uh, we lost.”
There were no quotes a writer could build a game story around. No pithy sound bites for radio and television.
But the way Murray took the loss, personally, revealed a character trait that is going to serve the Cardinals well this season, and for many more to come.
Murray hasn’t lost much in his life. He hates it. And he is not pleasant to be around afterward.
It’s exactly the attitude a starting quarterback should have, and it sends a message to the rest of the players:
This is not acceptable.
“You would think we just lost the Super Bowl,” said receiver Christian Kirk, who has known Murray since both were in high school, when asked how Murray handles losing. “That’s how hard he is on himself. That’s what you want to see, though. He cares so much. He’s so competitive.”
There are reasons choose to be content point in the season.
The Cardinals are 5-3, on target to finish with a winning record for the first time in five years.
And in just his second year in the NFL, Murray is on pace to become the first player in NFL history to rush for at least 1,000 yards and pass for 4,000 yards.
But what gnaws at Murray are the losses. To the 3-5 Lions, to the 3-6 Panfor Murray to at this midway
thers, to the 5-3 Dolphins.
By Wednesday, Murray’s designated day to talk to media, he was more in the mood to answer questions about how he handles losing, and why he was so upset after the loss to the Dolphins.
“I’m trying to win,” said Murray. “That’s the goal. For me personally, yeah, it’s time. It’s year two. We don’t have time to wait around and say, ‘We’ll do this year six or year seven.’ You never know. You never know when your last snap is going to be. I’m always striving to be better, always striving to be the best.
“We’ve got to be better about locking in, understanding we can’t take any opponent lightly, take any opponent for granted because you never know when it’s going to be your last. That’s how I play, that’s how I see it.”
Not everyone took Murray’s comments, or body language, that way.
On ESPN radio, former NFL linebacker Bart Scott said Murray doesn’t “put the onus on himself, he puts it ' we have to do something better' when the team struggles, so that tells you he is a finger pointer, not a thumb pointer.”
It’s a point of view grounded in ignorance.
Anyone who has watched Murray regularly, and listened to him in interviews, knows there are plenty of times when he blames himself for failed plays and losses.
He did earlier this year after he had three passes intercepted against the Lions.
“I feel like if I didn’t do what I did today, we win the game,” he said then.
One characteristic great players have, said receiver Larry Fitzgerald, is an intense disdain of losing, though they show it differently.
The 2008 Super Bowl team, for instance, drove quarterback Kurt Warner crazy during the regular season because players had not yet learned that paying attention to details separated the good from the great. Warner wasn't shy about voicing that opinion.
Former quarterback Carson Palmer’s style, in contrast, was to motivate quietly behind the scenes.
Fitzgerald was just fine with Murray being upset after last week’s loss to the Dolphins.
“Kurt was a fierce competitor,” Fitzgerald said, “and Carson was an unbelievable competitor as well. So was Emmitt Smith, Anquan Boldin, Edgerrin James. All these great players, Hall of Fame type quality players, they take it personal when they don’t win ball game.
“You like to see that it means a lot to him (Murray). I love the fact that it bothers him like that.”
Cardinals fans should, too, as long as Murray doesn’t have to show that side of himself too often.