Healthy again, Cards’ Murray feels urgency to win

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Entering his sixth season, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray said Monday that he feels a sense of urgency to start winning.

The 26-year-old Murray has just one winning record in his first five years, when the Cardinals went 11-5 in 2021 and lost in the NFC wild-card round. They started 7-0 that season and sat atop the conference until a second-half slide cost them the NFC West title. Arizona did not finish better than .500 in his other four seasons, including 2023, when it went 4-13 as Murray missed the first nine games rehabbing his right ACL.

“You never know when the game’s going to be taken away from you,” Murray said. “You’ll never know how long you’re going to be playing. So, my goal is to be the best, and since I was 4 years old my dream was to be a quarterback in the NFL, win Super Bowls, and that’s what I strive to do every single day.”

Murray is a week into his first training camp since 2022 after missing last year’s because of the injury, and the experience of being back on the field has made an impact on the 2019 first overall draft pick.

Just last week, Murray said he told quarterback coach Israel Woolfork and trainers “how blessed I feel as far as just to be healthy and be back out there just doing what I love. It’s a blast.”

Murray described this year’s training camp as a “completely new situation,” adding that what Arizona accomplished after he returned last season, going 3-5, doesn’t matter.

“Last year was just such a whirlwind for me as far as being hurt and then rehabbing the whole year, coming back in the middle of the season, which I’ve never done before,” Murray said. “And then again, as far as the play goes, having to get better each and every week again, and then feel like getting in the groove of things, and it kind of not really mean anything, but for me it meant something internally, but I think this year just getting to start off fresh, it is a big difference.”

Murray wasn’t shy about admitting that he and the offense have thought about its potential this season with him returning, the additions of rookie receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. and veteran receiver Zay Jones, the evolution of Trey McBride, and another year in the offense with running back James Conner and receivers Michael Wilson and Greg Dortch.

Murray said enough guys in the locker room have been on good offenses in the past that they understand how it feels and believe that it can be replicated this season in Arizona, which he added was “half the battle.”

Heading into the second year of the Cardinals’ offense, Murray thinks the “sky’s the limit” on what Arizona can do with the ball in its hands.

“I don’t put any limitation on what this offense can be or do,” he said. “I think we’re very versatile, got great skill set as far as receivers or running backs, again, me coming back healthy, I don’t feel like I even scratched the surface of what I’m capable of as far as moving around being a dual threat on the field at the back end of the season. So, like I said, I don’t put any limitation on what we can do.”

That sense of urgency to win led Murray, in part, to organize a weeklong trip to Los Angeles with 12 of his teammates to get everyone more reps, work on their timing and build their relationships off the field, all with one goal in mind: winning.

“Getting all those reps that we got, we may not have gotten if we didn’t do those things off the field because there’s the sense of urgency there,” Murray said. “We want to hit the ground running. We are not coming out this season, despite what everybody thinks or what they’re saying, we know we want to do in this locker room, so, in order to do that, you got to put the work in.”