IT HAPPENS EVERY YEAR. There's a moment -- and there's a quarterback -- that forces us to think. Knowing that we saw something special, we wonder how it might change the game forever. In 2020, the Hail Murray was that moment, and Kyler Murray was that quarterback. On Nov. 15, when Murray's seemingly forgettable pass suddenly found DeAndre Hopkins in a thicket of Buffalo Bills as time expired, it not only won the game for the Arizona Cardinals but seemed to signify the arrival of something new. We had seen short quarterbacks before, and we had seen fast quarterbacks before and we had seen short and fast quarterbacks before. Murray? He was different, short and fast and effective, this tiny man causing chaos and uprooting norms, a stylistic anomaly destined to shift the NFL paradigm. The Hail Murray materialized over 11 seconds, but the rush of it was so strong, so spectacular, so viral and so lasting -- it was awarded Clutch Performance Play of the Year at NFL Honors -- that we missed something essential: that the league had already caught on to Kyler Murray by turning all of the elements that made the play special against him.
5.62 seconds until the ball leaves his hand
Kyler Murray leaves the pocket. But even if this play hadn't been planned and practiced for almost two years, in the event of this precise moment against the Bills -- 11 seconds left, down by four, ball at midfield, options reduced to miracle -- and even if it hadn't been a designed rollout, Murray might have left anyway. The play is called Cowboy. It's not quite a Hail Mary. It's a deep route with a Hail Mary option -- wide receiver Andy Isabella crossing and Hopkins long -- and to pull it off, you need a lot of luck and a gifted quarterback. A few playoffs ago, Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury, then the head coach at Texas Tech, had watched Aaron Rodgers roll left and hit the Green Bay Packers' Jared Cook by the measure of a skimming foot along the sideline, setting up a field goal to beat the Dallas Cowboys. Kingsbury lifted it, renamed it. That in itself took some stones. Not stealing a play -- stealing an Aaron Rodgers play, as if magic can be replicated.
When Rodgers ran it, he calmly waited a beat in the pocket before wheeling left, turning his back to the line of scrimmage, a man in full control of situation and circumstance. Murray -- well, everything with him is fast, and so he just bolts the pocket, the mark of a young man whose talent has always rewarded impatience.
Jan. 3, 2021: Seven weeks after the Hail Murray
This is it, what quarterbacks live for: Regular-season finale, just under eight minutes left, Arizona down two scores to the Los Angeles Rams. If the Cardinals win, they're in the playoffs, the starting gate for all transcendent quarterbacks. Murray walks onto the field. Walks, not jogs, nursing a reinjured right leg. But now, down 18-7, he has something more valuable than two good legs: time left on the clock. The first four plays are two runs and two short passes, nothing spectacular -- nothing quintessentially Murray, who usually gobbles chunks of yards so fast that it puts defenses in a state of panic -- but they're moving the chains.
Then, it falls apart.
First-and-10, an illegal shift. First-and-15, run for a loss. Second-and-18, Murray drifts to the edges of the pocket, where he is most comfortable -- he needs room to set up and see downfield -- and he throws deep. The ball follows a familiar high arc, giving you a second to imagine another miracle. But it's underthrown and almost intercepted. Murray plays just 25 snaps due to the injury, and his season ends standing on the sideline, lips pursed, hands clasped behind his back, left to wonder how it all went wrong, and giving both himself and us a long offseason to consider whether he'll become a great quarterback or just look like one a few times a game.
4.62 seconds until the ball leaves his hand
Murray steps left against the Bills, less like a short player who was told he needed to adapt to the league and more like a force to which the league needs to adapt. Look at the first half of the season. Murray knocked off the defending conference champion San Francisco 49ers in Week 1 and beat the eventual division champion Seattle Seahawks in Week 7. He threw three touchdown passes three times in Arizona's first eight games. Five times he averaged more than seven yards a carry. Against the Miami Dolphins in Week 8, Murray rushed for 106 yards on 11 carries and hit 80.7% of his passes; his passer rating was 150.5 -- nearly perfect.
Yes, he went 42-0 as a starter at Allen High School in Allen, Texas; and yes, he won the Heisman Trophy in his only full season as a starter in college and was so captivating that Kingsbury mortgaged his entire career on him, telling friends after he took the Cardinals job that "I'm taking Kyler," even though Arizona had just drafted Josh Rosen in the first round a year earlier. And sure, Murray won AP Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2019. But defenses still weren't prepared for the burst in which he entered the league. It had never seen anyone like him. He used his height, 5-foot-10 tops, to his advantage rather than as a hurdle to overcome. The same impact Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill has downfield -- the threat of his speed is so great that defenders are almost afraid to close in -- Murray has at quarterback, following in the steps of Steve Young, Michael Vick and Lamar Jackson. Murray is a breathtaking signal-caller, with a quick and clean release; but he also is a funny one, with his helmeted head sitting so large on slim shoulders that he looks like a Lego figure and has legs that move so fast that his arms can't seem to keep up. "Like a roadrunner," a scout said at his pro day.
Nobody knows where good quarterbacks come from, what strange mix of talent, intelligence and ruthlessness they possess. But with Murray, the answer begins with something so basic as to be overlooked: How does he see downfield from the pocket?
Nobody knows. People have watched, studied, imagined. In 2019, the designers of Madden NFL had to build Murray. There was no prototype. It was not that he was short; it's easy to make a short quarterback. It was that an assumption for other quarterbacks -- that they actually can see downfield -- where designers ran into trouble with Murray. "We don't have anything specifically that impacts field vision," says game producer Clint Oldenburg. All Oldenburg had was his own experience, as a 6-foot-5 offensive lineman who was drafted by the New England Patriots and was a member of six teams during his three-year NFL career. He knows how vital it is for quarterbacks to be able to see over the line and knows all of the overlooked ways a lineman helps by shifting a rusher out of the way to manufacture throwing lanes. And that was for tall quarterbacks. Murray was so cutting edge that even technology had no answer. Oldenburg knew that Murray launched the ball from a shorter platform, so he made it a little easier for defenses to tip his passes. But after Murray's first season, Oldenburg upgraded him to Superstar Ability. It was a reaction to Murray's speed and accuracy and production, but it still didn't provide any clarity to the essential question. Oldenburg hopes that for this year's version, which will incorporate Next Gen stats, he'll be able to account for field vision, so that fans will have an idea -- a glimpse -- of what Murray sees on every play.
Ask Murray's backups how he finds throwing windows and they confess that they're still trying to figure it out themselves. Many of them have a habit: They stand behind Murray as he takes practice snaps, watching for clues. One of his backups at Oklahoma, Reece Clark, studied Murray, as if trying to understand a kind of football genius. Unlike Drew Brees, Murray does nothing to make himself taller. Brees stood on the tips of his toes and tilted his head back, almost peering through his facemask. Murray almost makes himself shorter, bouncing on flat feet, ready to run at any moment, refusing to concede to norms or reality. Clark watched how Murray would change his arm angle on nearly every throw, depending on the throwing lanes, to match the timing with the receiver on his route. The artistry of it all blew Clark's mind.
"It's a math equation that has to work out perfectly," Clark says now.
In 2019, Drew Anderson, a quarterback out of Murray State, went undrafted and was signed by the Cardinals as a free agent at about the same time that Murray arrived as the shiny first overall pick. Anderson wondered how Murray would act when they met in training camp -- some superstars barely acknowledge the fringe guys -- but Murray was friendly in his own quiet way, chatting with Anderson in meeting rooms as he nibbled candy. Anderson was 6-foot-4 and sometimes arms and bodies got in his way; he had "no idea" how Murray could see, he says now. But then Anderson watched how Murray moved in the pocket, and it was like going to the Indy 500: Television doesn't do the speed justice. "That first step and burst -- it was pretty crazy to see. It was on a different scale, honestly," Anderson says. In one of his first practices, Murray threw a deep post for a touchdown against the starting defense, reminding Anderson that his talents are so considerable that you sometimes forget the most basic one: He can really throw the damn ball.
Maybe Murray's vision is so rare that you have to look beyond quarterbacks -- or football -- to explain it. You need to call Muggsy Bogues. Bogues played in the NBA at 5-foot-3, the shortest player in league history. He is long retired, but he watched Murray the first half of this past season from his home in North Carolina -- watched his 24 total touchdowns in the first eight games, watched him enter the MVP conversation -- and saw an armored version of himself.
"It's dead on!" he says.
Bogues played in the NBA during the era of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, when so much of the game was played above the rim. Bogues could jump; he could dunk in practice. But to perform at the highest level, he went the opposite way, playing the game from down low, using his quickness to shift left, then right, then left, creating a rhythm of holes opening and closing -- "Seeing things through my lens and impacting it the way a bigger guy would" -- until one of those gaps stretched too far or closed too fast, and he made his move.
Bogues saw Murray doing the same thing, operating in tight and low quarters, where he created room before deciding whether to dish or drive. "His IQ level is off the charts," Bogues says. "We understand who we are."
Still, there are limits to what Murray can compensate for. Sometimes, the defense doesn't react. Sometimes, the holes aren't there. In college, Oklahoma lineman Cody Ford once asked Murray, "Brah, how do you see behind us?"
"Sometimes y'all be in the way," Murray replied. "That's why I gotta get outta there."
2.33 seconds until the ball leaves his hand
Murray gets outta there, and Bills defensive end Mario Addison is waiting for him, a smart play by a smart player who sacked Murray three times in a 2019 game and knew then and now that the quarterback wants -- and needs -- to leave the pocket. But there's a problem: It's only Addison out there against Murray, on an island. Addison has no chance.
Murray jukes around Addison, stopping and starting, creating just enough separation and begins to scan downfield.
Murray has always retained a practiced air of mystery and kept people guessing to his truest self. He is a person who donated 60,000 meals to the North Texas Food Bank in February, when a cold snap left hundreds of thousands of homes without power. He is also the person who went to an NBA game in March wearing a hat repping the Oakland Athletics (the team that drafted him ninth overall in 2018), which created another round of speculation that he might walk away from football altogether or, at very least, try to realize a lifelong goal by playing both sports, like Bo Jackson.
This offseason, he advocated for more influence in the Cardinals' personnel decisions, like few quarterbacks ever -- such as John Elway, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady -- have enjoyed. But in the public persona, he is rarely heard. When Murray arrived at Oklahoma, he asked coach Lincoln Riley if he could skip interviews -- like, all of them. Before the draft, when after years of abiding by the NCAA most top players are eager to cash in on their name, he barely promoted himself. He was raised to not only be wary of the outside world but to be wary of revealing himself to it, the son of a former Texas A&M quarterback whose career ended due to an ankle injury and who understood how quickly your career -- not to mention your humanity -- can be stripped away if you're not careful.
Flash back to Senior Night, Allen High, Allen, Texas, 2014. Kyler is the first player honored. His parents, Kevin and Missy, take photos with him and then head up to the stands. Kevin can see sharks circling outside a chain-link fence: fans, media, coaches, various hangers-on, all waiting for his son. The game begins. Missy takes notes of each play on her phone, long nails tapping the screen, while Kevin eats Cajun-spiced pistachios and watches his little son outmaneuver larger boys on the field. Toward the end of the first half, Murray throws a touchdown pass and limps to the sideline. Some think he is injured, but his father knows better.
"Frustrated," he says. "He's just sick of the ordinary play."
Even as a teenager, Kyler is a master at concealing his feelings. Many of his games were blowouts, with most of the action on the fringes of the field, where the hordes waited to tell Murray how great he was. It fell upon a select few to keep him grounded. At halftime, Kevin texts his son.
"Gotta play better," he writes.
Kevin is a kind but serious man, with a dry sense of humor, a loving father who understands the perils and fragility of the world his son is about to enter. After an outstanding college career in the mid-1980s, Kevin went undrafted. Long-standing racial stereotypes about what a Black quarterback could and couldn't do seemed to be at the heart of it. The world his son was about to enter -- really, the one he entered when he was 14 years old and in the early stages of his local legend -- is unforgiving. Kevin serves as a roadblock. Even then, Kyler's main opponents were not the other team but rather the ripples of his own talent -- the twin forces of fame and entitlement. Kevin saw it as his job to keep it all from going off the rails.
"Nobody is gonna care what he did at Allen High School," Kevin says in the stands in 2014, "when he gets to where he's going."
In the short term, Kyler Murray went to Texas A&M, where he played in eight games as a freshman before transferring to Oklahoma. Per NCAA rules, Murray had to sit out the 2016 season, then he sat behind Baker Mayfield in 2017. Not playing was hard, the first time Murray really had to deal with it, and Riley delivered a few hang-in-theres along the way. Murray took out frustration during practice. He was, Riley says now, "the perfect and the worst" scout team quarterback. On one hand, Murray was so talented that he could emulate any opposing quarterback, runner or thrower. On the other, he was unlike anyone else. There was one run in practice, before the Sugar Bowl against Auburn, during which Murray scrambled right, cut back diagonal and outran the safeties up the left sideline. Oklahoma's defense wasn't allowed to tackle Murray. They just had to tag him. And they couldn't do that.
And in meeting rooms -- well, Riley now wishes he had recorded some of the trash talk between Mayfield and Murray, two friendly but fierce competitors. They always sat on opposite sides of the room, filling the space between them with tweaks and barbs, going rounds over who was the best player in Texas high school history. If Riley showed film of Mayfield pulling off a nifty scramble for a first down, Murray would lift his eyes from his notebook, which was filled with handwritten keys to the game -- he is a ferocious note taker -- and say, "I woulda scored."
Mayfield seemed to know it. Anything less than being the best player in the country, anything less than the Heisman that he won -- anything less than a career that led him to be the first overall draft pick -- and he might have been handed a clipboard. When Mayfield was benched for two series against West Virginia after he had grabbed his crotch the previous week against Kansas, Murray finally got his chance -- and ran for 66 yards on the first play.
"Man," Mayfield once told other Sooners quarterbacks, "when I leave, Kyler is going to break all my records."
Murray earned a nickname -- Seamless -- and a reputation for revealing exactly as much about himself as he wanted. He would ask other quarterbacks what they did on weekends, who the girls were that they were talking to, how they met them. But when asked about himself, what he did, Murray smoothly deflected: "Chilled, stayed home, played video games."
The quirks extended to lunch. On Wednesdays during his junior season, Murray treated his starting offensive linemen to lunch at a place called the Tea Café. Murray would always order the same thing: lo mein, with an extra egg on the side. He wanted to mix the eggs into the lo mein himself. Why, nobody knew.
"You know, they'll do it for you," Ford once told him. "It'll taste the same."
"Nah," Murray replied.
This dude, Ford thought. What a strange, likable anomaly. When he speaks, he does so without saying much. His social media feeds are the best reflection of him that we've got. He posts a lot of compliments for his teammates. About social justice. His own highlights. And he lets others say what he doesn't want to say for himself, like this winter, when he retweeted Chiefs defensive end Frank Clark: EVERYBODY DOESN'T DESERVE TO KNOW YOU PERSONALLY #protectyours. But in the end, Murray's philosophy seems to be that you get most of what you need on the field: If you want to know something true and authentic about a purposefully unknowable person, all you need to do was watch him play -- especially at the end of last season, when the quarterback who needs space finally ran out of it.
Dec. 26, 2020: Six weeks after the Hail Murray
The Cardinals are trailing the 49ers 20-12. It has been a brutal game for Murray -- 31 completions for only 247 yards, no touchdowns, three sacks absorbed -- but once again, he had a chance to pull off another miracle. In the fourth quarter, he drove the Cardinals down the field, but his throw to the end zone was off his back foot, underthrown and intercepted. The frustration seems to set in. The 49ers defensive players notice the Cardinals players yelling at their coaches over the playcalling.
But with 1:05 left, Murray has another shot. He hits Larry Fitzgerald twice and Christian Kirk once. He throws deep on third down, but it's incomplete. On fourth-and-6, Murray hangs in the pocket, but defensive end Alex Barrett breaks through up the middle. Murray flinches, as if he considers running but thinks better of it. He throws outside. It's incomplete. Barrett hits him on the release. Murray is on the ground, not getting up. He slaps his right leg, then rocks up, then falls back and to the right, in a familiar heap.
How he was injured, nobody knows. It wasn't a hard hit. The 49ers players later told their coaches that they thought Murray was faking it, wounded in pride rather than body. He wasn't. He just masked it well.
His penchant for leaving the pocket has been a survival method and the mechanism for producing spectacular plays. It also seems unsustainable. Murray is an expert at sliding to avoid hits -- the A's picked him for a reason -- but at quarterback, there's only so much contact you can avoid. And on top of that, Murray doesn't always want to; he is sensitive to the notion that he can't absorb hits. He was once on a bus, next to Riley, and the coach made a wisecrack about his unwillingness to seek contact.
"Well, hang on a sec," Murray said.
He pulled out his phone, sifted through YouTube highlights -- Murray was built for YouTube, always on fast-forward -- and showed Riley a clip of a small player laying out an opponent.
"Why are you showing me this?" Riley said.
"Well, that's me."
"No it's not."
Murray looked at Riley, and by then, Riley knew Murray well enough to be able to tell when he's not joking. It cut to his core, the idea that he was too small to play a man's game.
"No," Murray said, "that is me."
But in the NFL, it's different. And with his build, it was a matter of time before he got up slow.
Two seconds until the ball leaves his hand
Murray looks downfield. Isabella is crossing, but he's covered -- and by now, Murray knows that he is running out of time. He has one option left. As Riley watches from his home in Oklahoma, alongside his two daughter, something about these seconds feel familiar. He doesn't remember any Hail Marys during Murray's college days; Murray later confirmed that the Hail Murray was his first one. The closest thing to it, Riley remembers, was against Oklahoma State during Murray's lone year as a starter. Same type of deal: Murray dropped back, a rusher pinched the pocket, Murray fled, squared his shoulders and threw deep downfield to running back Trey Sermon for a first down inside the red zone. Riley saw it all unfolding here: Not many quarterbacks could have escaped the pocket, not many could have looked downfield, not many could have made an accurate throw, but most of all, not many were capable of what Murray seemed to possess in abundance: magic.
Murray's current coach, Kingsbury, is known for his looks, all smile and jaw and gelled hair. But those who work with Kingsbury have seen him in less handsome moments -- tired and sallow and grinding to find new ways to deploy his quarterback and win games, under pressure for what will have been no playoff trips in his first two years in Arizona. Every week, Kingsbury talks football with Jake Spavital, the coach at Texas State and one of Kingsbury's best friends. The two of them have known Murray for years. Spavital first met the QB during Murray's sophomore year at Allen High. As the coach at Texas Tech, Kingsbury had no chance at Murray, but Spavital was on the staff at Texas A&M that got him, at least for a year.
"He's the greatest player we've ever seen in this state," Kingsbury told Spavital when Murray was in high school.
Spavital talks to Kingsbury at least daily, comparing notes after every Cardinals game. He knows that teams are trying to erase Murray in the running game, forcing a potentially transcendent quarterback to be an ordinary one, throwing from the pocket, checking off options. Spavital is amazed at Kingsbury's creativity, ways that he dresses up the same plays differently for Murray, with Diamond formations in the backfield -- three players in the backfield alongside the quarterback, who is in the shotgun -- and two tight ends.
It's worked, just enough: Against the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 15, Murray throws for 406 yards and three touchdowns. And against the New York Giants a week earlier, Murray might have had his best game -- not as a highlight machine but as a boring, game-managing quarterback. There was one play in the fourth quarter, with the Cardinals up 23-7, that Spavital felt was one of Murray's best reads of the year, showing not only growth but mastery. It was third-and-2. Murray faked a run and dropped into the pocket, sliding to his right. He had two receivers breaking outside to the right sideline, and both were covered, and he pump-faked and checked down short and over the middle to Hopkins. It was smooth and clean and a glimpse of what might be someday. "When Kyler figures it all out," Spavital says, "he's going to be dangerous."
Nov. 29: Two weeks after the Hail Murray
"Don't get bored," New England Patriots linebacker Ja'Whaun Bentley says on the sideline to teammates. "Keep him in the pocket. Make him throw."
Nobody has ever used the word "bored" when watching Kyler Murray. Lighting it up or struggling, he makes you jump off your couch. But now, something strange has set in. The Cardinals are visiting New England in a game Arizona should win. But New England is forcing the league's best fast-break quarterback to play a half-court game. There isn't much space. One of the most common mistakes pass-rushers make when playing Murray is that they're so eager to get to him that they take themselves out of the play, giving Murray a numbers advantage. If the two defensive ends rush so far upfield that Murray is able to duck underneath them and scoot out of the pocket, those guys are out of position and irrelevant, and now it's 11-on-9 -- math Murray likes.
The Patriots don't seem to rush Murray as much as bracket him, making a man who prefers space stay put, and leap as he throws, making a tall forest taller. During one key second-half sequence, New England coach Bill Belichick tells players on the sideline, "He almost threw a pick on that last one." On the next drive, Bentley yells before the snap, "Slant! Watch the slant!" Murray throws a slant. Patriots linebacker Chase Winovich seemed to know that for Murray to throw a slant, he'd have to throw it fast. And so Winovich jumps more than rushes, forcing Murray to adjust. The pass is tipped and intercepted.
This template to throttling Murray isn't new. New England's tenets -- disciplined rush, jamming throwing lanes -- have been used against Murray dating back to high school. Claude Mathis was the coach at DeSoto High School in Texas. He faced Murray three times in the postseason; Murray beat him each time. Mathis tried to contain Murray with what he called an Umbrella rush. "And we did a damn good job," Mathis says now, with that familiar air of resignation. "But it only takes one play." Murray haunted Mathis, altering his entire career. Rather than Mathis winning three straight Texas high school championships, Murray did. People kept asking Mathis why his squad couldn't beat this one kid. "He's really good!" Mathis would reply. As much as Mathis enjoyed Murray graduating from high school -- he no longer had to contend with him -- he loved watching Murray toy with defenses in college and into the NFL. It was a relief. The Umbrella rush rarely worked for anyone. "It makes me feel better," Mathis says.
But today, Murray is facing a coach who specializes in making quarterbacks uncomfortable, and it's just enough. Arizona scores only 17 points against a depleted Patriots team, and New England wins it with a field goal as time expires.
One second until the ball leaves his hand
Murray rounds his rollout, upfield and towards the sideline, and squares his hips. He might have the quickest hips in the league. One of the hardest things for most right-handed quarterbacks to do is to throw deep while running left, with your momentum pulling you out of bounds. But for a few, it's weirdly easy: If your hips and shoulders lock into place, all of the momentum works like a slingshot. Murray is one of those few. Jim Zorn, the former NFL quarterback and coach, worked with Murray before the 2019 draft, and Zorn says he has never seen quicker hips in a quarterback than those of Murray. He rotates his hips "violently," Zorn says. "His upper body rotates with it, and the arm whips. It happens really quick."
When Zorn worked with Murray in the spring of 2019, he focused less on the physical part of the game -- Murray didn't even plan to throw on the move during his pro day workout; it was all from the pocket, to emphasize that he could do it -- than the mental part. In each of his years there, Murray relearned the Oklahoma playbook from scratch, an exercise Riley made all the quarterbacks do. Zorn tried to fine tune it. During workouts in Southern California, Zorn would show him the difference between an Over Front and a Bear Front then impress upon him the importance of it all.
One day that spring, Mayfield dropped by. He was the newest prince of the league, had finally given the Cleveland Browns hope and won two rookie of the year awards. A year later, Mayfield struggled so much that some wondered whether he would remain the Browns starter. In that, Murray got a glimpse of his own future, even if he didn't know it at the time. You can enter the league, and even surprise it, but defenses always catch up. The hardest part is staying ahead, improving in ways that only you and your coaches notice -- but that allow you to thrive. It's not as easy as it sounds. In fact, it's as hard as it looks. You learn how to stand tall in the pocket, how to move from Options A to D rather than Option A and then an escape hatch. You use your weapons, and you campaign for more, like former superstar wide receiver A.J. Green, whom the Cardinals signed in free agency. You learn to think beyond yourself. The truth about quarterbacking is that you achieve greatness when you're so consistent with the easy stuff -- with the ordinary play that he was once so sick of -- that you don't need miracles like the Hail Murray.
Nov. 19: One week after the Hail Murray
He's down. It's late in the first quarter, and the Seahawks have Murray corralled. He drops back and sees a different kind of pass rush -- and a way forward for defensive coordinators who were wondering how to stop the league's latest force. Seattle entered the game blitzing more than usual, but against Murray, coach Pete Carroll unveiled exactly what Zorn told Murray to learn: a Bear Front -- five men on the line of scrimmage -- to keep him in the pocket and force him to be not a flashy quarterback but a standard one. Murray has nowhere to go. He scrambles up in the pocket and is tackled by two Seahawks. Defensive end Carlos Dunlap lands on Murray, driving the quarterback's shoulder into the ground. Murray winces, visibly in pain. He had injured his shoulder two weeks earlier against the Dolphins, forcing him to alter his release, and now, on the sideline, he winces as he throws. He suddenly doesn't seem so dangerous, and there's a question that will follow him until he answers it. It's not just how a 5-foot-10 quarterback sees down the field but if a 5-foot-10 quarterback can stay on it. What makes football so compelling is also what football itself, by virtue of its core brutal physicality, can do to smash and crush and destabilize precisely its most exciting talents. All quarterbacks know this, accept it as a fate of their profession. Only a few transcend it.
The ball leaves his hand
Space is closing but Murray has enough of it to wind up. He sees Hopkins toward the end zone surrounded by a mass of white jerseys. Murray barely sets his feet, but he is alone out on the edge, and there's a brief moment of pure athleticism, where he gathers himself and winds up. Time seems to slow. Few quarterbacks ever can summon so much power from such a wobbly platform. Murray is exhausted, and he is injured, but he sees something nobody else does. The ball rockets into the air, forcing us to wonder and imagine -- and then, just when the thrill is beginning, the ball turns on its nose and begins its descent.