As expected, the Cardinals released Kyler Murray as soon as the new league year began at 4:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, and as expected, he signed with the Vikings. Minnesota is the premier quarterback landing spot this offseason with the duo of Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison propping up any signal-caller, and Murray, while flawed, is comfortably the best free-agent quarterback on the market.
KYLER MURRAY
- This will likely be termed as a competition between Murray and J.J. McCarthy. If it’s a true competition and Minnesota is okay calling it on McCarthy after only one year, Murray should win the job comfortably. McCarthy threw more interceptions than touchdowns in his first season playing in the pros, and he averaged just 167.8 yards per game in eight full starts (excluding games in which he played fewer than 100% of snaps). It was an abject disaster for the former first-round pick, and Murray was brought in to win games in 2026.
- Murray only played five games in 2026 before a mid-foot sprain ended his season. The initial timeline on the injury was 4-6 weeks, but the recovery apparently didn’t go as planned, and eventually Murray appeared to get soft-benched by Arizona as the team counted down the weeks until a nightmare season closed. Murray struggled in his five games, averaging just 6.0 yards per attempt, but he threw for 7.1 YPA with 21 touchdowns and 11 interceptions in 2024. The 572 yards he rushed for in 2024 also marked the second-highest total of his career, an important consideration as he heads into his age-29 season, coming off a significant foot injury.
- Projecting Murray’s rushing usage will be the key for fantasy purposes. He was averaging 5.8 rushing attempts per game pre-injury in 2025, his highest average since 2023, and he had 572 rushing yards in 2024. He’s now a year older, coming off a foot injury, but he can be a fantasy QB1 if the Vikings make an effort to get his legs going.
- Murray is a passable NFL quarterback with some rushing upside who lands in a good spot. Kevin O’Connell‘s revival of Sam Darnold is admittedly less impressive after Darnold led the Seahawks to the Super Bowl, but KOC has generally provoked efficient play out of his quarterbacks, with McCarthy being the notable exception. Having Jefferson, Addison, and even T.J. Hockenson to throw passes to doesn’t hurt, either. It’s hard to rate Murray’s odds of being a 17-game starter right now, but as long as he is a starter, he could compete for top-12 standing in fantasy.
VIKINGS PLAYERS
- This is great news for Jefferson and Addison. At the very least, we know Murray is a competent NFL quarterback, and unless last year’s foot injury somehow sapped him of his talent, Minnesota pass catchers now have a more stable floor. Jefferson and Addison each posted career-low marks in yards per target last year; those numbers should climb back up in 2026.
- For Hockenson, it’s worth mentioning that Trey McBride had seven touchdowns in 3.5 seasons with Murray at QB, and then 10 in 12 games with Jacoby Brissett. Murray is 5-foot-10, unusually short for an NFL quarterback, and it’s fair to question whether his middle-of-the-field capabilities are limited with hulking linemen playing in front of him. McBride still posted massive target numbers with Murray under center, but the TDs spiked once Brissett took over.
CARDINALS PLAYERS
- Arizona radio host John Gambadoro reported that Jacoby Brissett would be the starter for the Cardinals in 2026, with free-agent signing Gardner Minshew backing him up. We still have to get through the draft, and Arizona has six months to add more competition to the QB room, but it appears Brissett getting the nod is at least on the table. That would be an interesting development for the Cards’ pass catchers after Brissett averaged a monstrous 280.5 passing yards and 1.9 passing touchdowns from Week 6 onward after getting the starting gig. The Cardinals got in some impossibly bad scripts in 2025, forcing Brissett to drop back nearly every play in some games, and Mike LaFleur‘s new staff might not go as extreme with the pass rates (Arizona led the league in Pass Rate Over Expectation last year).
- Brissett’s stint to close the year offers the blueprint for how Cardinals pass catchers can return value, but the fact remains that this roster will be potentially the worst in football on paper, and the quarterback play will almost certainly be pretty bad as well. They will need absurd volume, like they got in 2025, to return value. With that being said, Murray’s exit shouldn’t change anything in the market too much since it was already known he was gone.
