Much of the talk about the Arizona Cardinals this season has been about if and when star quarterback Kyler Murray might return from ACL surgery. Murray made his season debut Sunday, and while his overall performance showed some rust, he was certainly important to the Cardinals’ eventual 25-23 home win over the Atlanta Falcons (just Arizona’s second victory of the year).
The Cardinals got the ball back with 2:33 left in the fourth quarter. They were down one at that point after an Atlanta touchdown and missed two-point conversion.
But Murray then led an 11-play, 70-yard drive that set up Matt Prater’s walk-off game-winning field goal from 23 yards out. Here’s one key play from that drive:
KYLER MURRAY!pic.twitter.com/3lXc3FroEH
— The Comeback (@thecomeback) November 13, 2023
And here’s the eventual field goal from Prater:
The Cardinals are 2-8 on the season, but they're now 1-0 when Kyler Murray plays.
Matt Prater nails a walk-off field goal and Arizona takes down the Falcons!pic.twitter.com/hUSbspl6AR
— The Comeback (@thecomeback) November 13, 2023
On the day, Murray finished with 19 completions on 32 attempts (59.4%) for 249 yards with no touchdowns and an interception, not the world’s greatest numbers. In fact, Josh Dobbs arguably put up a better showing for Arizona two weeks ago, where he completed 25 of 37 attempts (67.6%) for 208 yards with two touchdowns and two interceptions in a loss to the Baltimore Ravens.
But the Cardinals promptly traded Dobbs to the Minnesota Vikings (where he’s fit in well so far, to say the least, getting wins last week and this week after replacing the injured Jaren Hall last week) in order to swap a seventh-round pick for a sixth-round pick and pave the way for Murray’s return. (Clayton Tune, who completed 11 of 20 passes for 58 yards with two interceptions last week in a 27-0 loss to the Cleveland Browns, certainly isn’t standing in Murray’s way.) And that may yet work out okay for them.
While Murray’s numbers here weren’t great, and while he was playing against the now 4-6 Falcons and all of their own issues, he definitely showed some flashes of what he can do. And he’s an incredibly talented player, and that’s been seen from his college career at Texas A&M and Oklahoma that saw Arizona select him as the first overall pick in the 2019 NFL Draft through his NFL career to date (including Pro Bowl nods in 2020 and 2021) and his five-year, $230.5 million extension last summer.
We’ll see how Murray continues to bounce back from this surgery. But that final drive Sunday was certainly impressive, and got an immediate result for his team.
