Kyler Murray Accuracy Issues Overblown

A bad showing against Dallas has some worried about Kyler Murray‘s passing

Kyler Murray, young quarterback that he is, is already experiencing the back-and-forth tug of media love and hate. A media darling after dominant wins against San Francisco, Washington, and the New York Jets, a bad game against Dallas on Monday night snuffed out the flame.

The world of sports journalism often falls prey to a good deal of recency bias. As soon as one of the greats, take Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers for instance, has a bad game the media jump on them with overblown claims about their age and drop in production only to pull back as soon as they pull out another high-level performance.

Now, it was an admittedly mediocre performance for Murray who only completed 9 of 24 passes for the night. A large chunk of his 188-yards came from two big plays to Christian Kirk and DeAndre Hopkins for 80 and 60-yards respectively. Communication errors also seem to continue plaguing the young offense with wrong routes or options seeming to be a trend with Andy Isabella.

A 37.5% completion rate is atrocious and absolutely deserving of attention. However, the main reason it deserves attention is not because it is a normal occurrence but rather very abnormal for the second-year Arizona Cardinals quarterback.

Even with his awful passing performance against Dallas, Murray is still averaging a 65.9% completion rate compared to 64.4% his rookie year where his lowest mark was Week 1 at 53.7%. The most important metric, touchdowns, are significantly improved this year with 10 passing touchdowns through six weeks compared to 20 all of last season.

Murray is finding ways to win football games and sometimes that means knowing when to throw it away. He leads the league in throwaways this season and that is not necessarily a negative stat as it is clearly preferable to the sacks for big loss he consistently took last year. In 2019 he was sacked 48 times, many his fault, this year he has been brought down only 9 times.

On the ground, Murray is on track for over 980 rushing yards and has effectively utilized his feet in all four of Arizona’s wins. Sure, this statistic doesn’t have anything to do with throwing accuracy but it does point to an overall progression being seen in the young quarterback.

Yes, Murray had a bad passing game against Dallas. No, this is not any reason for concern. As this relatively young offense continues to meld together and communication issues stop plaguing the passing game, Murray will more than likely return to the high accuracy he was not so long ago praised for.