Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Analytics expert Kevin Cole analyzes Vikings' ceiling with Kyler Murray

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

How good can the Minnesota Vikings be with Kyler Murray as their quarterback? Analytics expert Kevin Cole from Unexpected Points analyzes the Vikings' ceiling with Murray. Can they legitimately compete for a Super Bowl with Murray at quarterback? What factors will play into it? Would Kevin bail on JJ McCarthy after the Vikings signed Carson Wentz? Did the NFC North have a good free agency overall? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider presented by Fandul. Matthew Collar here. And on the show today, Kevin Cole. All right, Kevin Cole from the terrific unexpected points newsletter, a deep dive of data from Kevin, formerly of PFF, and somebody we've leaned on a lot here on the show to fully understand analytics and also a lot with quarterbacks, too. You've had this very big project you've done in the past with trying to. rank all the quarterbacks and put it in context and all those things.

And something during free agency that you've done every year, Kevin, is the improvement index. How much did every team actually get better during free agency? And you know what? Gets people worked up. Every time you send it out gets people pretty worked up. But here's the thing that people might not expect if I said to Vikings fans, well, where do you think the Vikings rank in that?

I think they'd be like a 28th? no on the positive side of the ledger of the improvement index. So why don't we just begin with how's that work? Explain that to me, Kevin. Sure, sure. Yeah, I'll try to explain it. I mean, anything you can do where you can rank order teams include some sort of very rudimentary graphic design in there, boom, you know, engagement, engagement.

So for this, I'll explain some of the methodology because it'll help also illuminate as to why teams may be moving in different directions or not. So this is not a judgment call on how the money has been spent, the value that's gotten you to this point. This is not looking at how the team performed last year and then versus how they will perform this year. those are not not factors into it what it what it is is a snapshot where I take the year end 2025 rosters take that snapshot and then I project into 2026 how good these rosters are going to be now there's some modeling there's some nerd stuff in there about allocating all the different snaps allocating how good the players will be I have this this plus minus formula that I do where I look at past player performance you know and try to gauge

on off the field, how valuable guys are to give them a value ranking. So everyone has a value ranking there. So it has that. And that is your baseline, essentially. And then every time there is a move in the off season, there's a trade, there's a signing, I switch player from Team A to Team B, and then I recalculate. I re-sort all the snaps. I recalculate the efficiencies, which are pretty similar.

They don't change that much team by team. Obviously, that's something you can argue with with different players and different fits and things like that. but we're trying to keep things simple here. And then it recalculates what, I'm assuming, kind of the total point differential you're looking for for these teams. And then the difference is essentially how much a team has improved. Now, for the Vikings specifically,

quarterback makes a big difference in this. And it's not just, again, the value that you got on this particular signing, but there is a improvement over what was assumed to have been there in the past. And that factors in quite a bit with the Vikings because, you know, spoiler alert, the projection for J.J. McCarthy was not great on the year end roster. When we talk about their quarterback play last year, I want to try to put this in some sort of points number because, you know, expected points added tries to do this and does a pretty good job of it. Last year, in terms of their passing game, the Vikings were 28th in expected points added,

which is as bad as you think. But if you look at EPA, at least on pro football reference, that was like minus 40 points. And the best teams in the NFL, the Matthew Stafford, the Drake May, you're talking like plus 200 for their passing games. And this is why passing is still king as

much as the run game and, you know, we love our running backs and so forth. And it's great to run down somebody's face. But also it's the thing that's driving success is still, how good are you at passing? So the gap between being 28th and being at the top,

is like 200 and something points. The gap between being in the middle, I think, is also pretty darn enormous. Because if you look at the Vikings' final point differential, they're on the positive side of that while still having one of the worst passing games in the NFL. So the idea would be if Kyler Murray could come in and provide even an average passing game, even the 14th best passing game, you're talking about an improvement of like 100 points. and if the Vikings had had a hundred and eleven point differential, they're a pretty scary team going into the playoffs.

I mean, I know that that's a sort of simple way to lay it out. But is that how you look at it from the potential improvement from where they were last year to where they could be if Kyler Murray plays at his usual baseline level when he has a decent team? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's exactly it. I'm looking at points here. And I mean, you could also translate that in.

to wins. Unfortunately, on a per player signing basis, it seems very muted, the differences when we talk about something like wins. So essentially, if you look at, if you just look at point differentials over time and then wins over 500 for teams or below 500, if you have negative point differential, it's somewhere in the 30s per win. So when you're talking about, you know, if you're going to add an additional 100 points, it's maybe three more wins than you would have had in that circumstance. So not that bad at all. And yeah, you're right.

When it comes to quarterbacks, they're all kind of adding points above a replacement level. So it's the difference between that. And for Kyler, it's the biggest upgrade of anyone on the season. And, of course, if we're going to say a value calculation in here, hey, you're getting them for the league for basically the minimum that you can pay him. So it's nothing but an upside move there. It is, but let's talk about Kyler from a data perspective for his career because it's kind of interesting.

He comes into the league by year two. You could make an argument that he's a fringe top 10 if you're looking at your PFF grade or if you're looking at your EPA. And even if you're adding in the rushing, we know this rushing quarterbacks. They tend to add a lot of EPA. And from 2020 to 2024, Kyler Murray is in the top three. for EPA for running quarterbacks, which can't be ignored when we're talking about from a point's perspective, how many points does he add? But there's also some years in there, 2022, 2022, 2023 that you look at and go, if he plays like

that, that's not going to cut it for the Minnesota Vikings. Yet we also have to try to contextualize all of these things of who was there, who was coaching, what were the circumstances, what were the receivers. this is why evaluating the quarterbacks are so different. But if they got baseline, Kyler Murray, like the average of all of that, like, where does that put them? When you look at his numbers, like, what do you come up with for trying to project him with Minnesota? Yeah. So I went through and produced where I have this, I'm again, getting into the nerd stuff here,

but I called this Bayesian quarterback rankings where it essentially looks. that an assumption based upon someone's draft status, what year they are in the league, because rookies typically play perform worse, and then there's a jump up in your second year. And it has that as the baseline. And then each piece of information you get, every single snap that comes in, every single play involvement that we call it for quarterback. So a design run for the quarterback or a dropback for the quarterback, it shows what their value was on that one versus what you would have expected,

and then it moves it up or down. Now, the more information you have, the more you can move that. And also the more information you have, it has like a range of potential outcome. So that range becomes more narrow because, you know, you know more about them. So there's, there's less uncertainty in what that projection will be. So I went ahead and ran everything for assumed starters for the 26th season. We don't really have anyone for Vegas for sure at this point. I mean, it's going to be a rookie, right?

it's going to be, we're going to see the number one pick there. And I included in that McCarthy and then I also included in that, Kyler Murray, just to get an idea of the differences between those two and where they shake out. So out of these, he's 32 quarterbacks because I have two there for potentially for the Vikings. McCarthy was third to last with only Brissette and Shadur Sanders below him. And then Kyler Murray was 21st, below. Daniel Jones, C.J. Stroud, Bo Nix, Caleb Williams, guys like that. But above, you know, some guys who have more uncertainty, a lot more uncertainty in their projections.

When we talk about Michael Pennix and Jackson Dart, but we saw good stuff from them, and Malik Willis is another. We saw some good information from them, but we don't have that much certainty. So they probably have more upside. But at least for Kyler, we're talking about someone who's maybe on the doorstep of the top 20. And the reason being is, as you mentioned, You know, he has had, by my numbers where I have this adjusted EPA number, he has had three seasons of a top 12 performance. And then he's basically had four seasons where he's been a little bit outside of the top 20. So it's really that rushing component. That is the huge thing here. And you don't know.

But I did think when he started to have some injury problems, he came back sometimes where he wasn't running as much afterwards. You sign a big contract. You are the guy. You don't want to be that scrambling quarterback anymore. There's probably some psychology that comes into that and just wanting to take care of yourself. And you have, you know, your meal ticket is punched for the rest of your life once you sign that big contract. That's probably part of it. And I think even beyond the top 12 part, there have been multiple seasons.

I think someone in Kyler's second season, maybe in his third season where, you know, Kyler Murray, is he an MVP candidate, was an actual discussion in the first half of the season. And I think it was a legitimate discussion, too, with the assumption that he could carry out that type of play, which we hadn't seen in the past. So there is maybe even more upside than we see in his year end numbers because within those seasons, there have been multiple blocks where there's been injuries and other things that have kind of derailed where he had even a higher number going into the first half of the season before he got injured. And I'm curious what we could say about trying to compare and contrast what he had in Arizona

because it wasn't always absolutely horrendous. I mean, the fact that he did have DeAndre Hopkins and Hopkins was a little in and out of the lineup during the seasons that he was there. But when he threw to Hopkins, he was wildly successful and he pushed him the football. And Trey McBride, the more that I've watched Kyler Murray, I'm a little cynical sometimes about tight ends because a lot of them average like nine and a half yards per reception. and they get paid huge dollars on reception counts. But Trey McBride was used as like a wide receiver won a lot in that lineup because they had

Zay Jones and Greg Dorch and a top draft pick who either wasn't ready or just might not be that good. And Murray was able to get him the football. They did have a good offensive line in 2004. They were fourth and PFF pass blocking grade. So it's not like he never had anything. But he also did not quite have a gentleman by the name of Justin Jefferson who had more yards in his first five seasons than any other player in NFL history.

Also on the defensive side, I think that defense factors into this. Sam Darnold's a Super Bowl champion. I don't think he played much different in 2025 as he did in 2024, but he gets a ring in part because they have a great defense. The Vikings are expected to have a great defense. What do we do with that when we're trying to make a projection? Because I feel like this can be overstated. And I've noticed a lot of player press conferences that, well, you know,

know, my new team's going to use me much better than my old team or my situation so much better than it was before, not always a guarantee. But I think in this case, you can make a pretty strong argument that it is. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that we can point to that will probably change, assuming we have some defensive continuity and a style of play, maybe also offensively, that'll be a little bit lower volume on passing, is that Kyler has not. not had an easy situation, I think, if you want to say the reliance on him, just in pure, again, we talk about these play involvements, whether it's running or dropping back to pass.

Now, it's always, it's tough analytically to figure out, you know, is it good to, is it, most people just assume lower volume means good, but then that's also associated with a team that's playing well because you're not throwing as much, so you're throwing off there. And then some, if you actually look at volume, sometimes it can actually look better because if you have a really great quarterback, you're going to drop back a lot to pass also. So there's a little bit of a selection bias there. But we can definitely say that if you're throwing less often, you can you can get a higher outcome maybe than what your baseline performance is, simply from the fact that you're only throwing normally in certain types. of situations as much. You're not pressing as much there. And you just have more uncertainty that comes with lower volumes. If you look at Kyler in his career, so if we're combining rushes and

dropbacks by season, rookie year, 711, second year, 739, 627 and 14 games after that, 502 and 11 games, 347 and 8 games, 684 in a full season, and then 221 last year and only five games. I mean, that's right, near the top of every single season, how much he's being utilized in these situations. And it's going to be stressful. It's going to be stressful on anyone. I think it allows you to accumulate some big, huge numbers if you're someone like Peyton Manning who's always been throwing a lot, but isn't necessarily how you want to be playing, especially if you're a quarterback where that injury concern, I think comes into play a little bit more than what you would like. So that alone, I think if we get that number down, there can be some calming effect also maybe on

his play and his ability to run more strategically than necessarily have to be like the goal line type of option running the ball also while dropping back to pass and everyone knows it's coming on every play. This is why it's so important for the Vikings to improve their run game and bringing back Aaron Jones with Jordan Mason is not super compelling for that. Their offensive line has to stay healthy schematically. They've made some additions to their coaching staff that might help. but this is an argument for drafting, I don't know, Judarian Price in the second round or something like that is, even though it's not great to draft running backs high, you might want to consider it.

And I was listening to Clint Kubiak talk about Sam Darnold and how he's been able to reduce the sacks because Sam Darnold went from being sacked almost 50 times to only 27 times. And he said like the main idea of being a run first offense isn't that we think that we can just run down the entire field. part of it is to protect the quarterback, the more you can run, the more you could play action out of that. And Kubiak also did a great job when he had Kirk of protecting the quarterback. This is something I think that Kevin O'Connell really has to work with and also maybe have some games where the analytics folks like ourselves, we can't stand a second down and 10 run, but you might want to do it in the context of the game. If your defense is playing well, if you're winning a little bit of the battle for field position, to take the load off of Kyler Murray instead of asking him to try to come in and save your entire

franchise, just be, you know, the straw that stirs the drink. And watching 2025, I mean, there's a lot of free runners at him. There's, you know, miscues and things like that where it really is asking him to scramble around a lot. And some of it he causes for himself. But I can see where they would have such a unique and dynamic talent. It would be like, let's put everything on him. I think that's more for legends in college. The college guys, you do that.

Legends, you do that. I don't think you do that with Murray. And what's interesting to me, Kevin, is this model that you're talking about. I think it's really worked with a bunch of quarterbacks. When we look through the NFC, we could go, well, they tried to reduce the workload on Caleb Williams. And it worked. They have reduced the workload on Jared Gough in Detroit. And they drafted a running back and they leaned on their offensive line for years.

Jalen Hertz is another. one, Brock Purdy is another one where you're leaning on these other things and then the quarterback just has to do his job. I think that this is something that's proven over many years of the NFL is kind of a way to hack not having Peyton Manning. But especially in the NFC right now, I look at all the quarterbacks and go, well, who's, who's the Bahomes, who's the Allen, who's the Lamar Jackson, all of these guys need help in the way that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. And I think for, if you're going to go back and look at Darnold, I mean, His volume was actually decently high with the Vikings,

but last year, I mean, per game dropbacks were very low, which I think helps a lot also. I mean, Murray has been someone who's had some tendency to have some catastrophic-ish sort of mistakes. So lowering volume there, again, you just, anything you can do to prevent these massive value losses. I mean, sometimes people probably don't even really appreciate how huge, something like a strip sack or just any sort of fumble can be on a first and 10 type of play. We're talking about a play that will take, you know, 15, 20 moderately positive plays to make up the value lost on a single play.

So I think some of it is about that with him too. And again, the more you press, the more you're trying to come from behind, the more your defense may be that good. you can look at that as a risk-reward sort of situation. And I think a lot of quarterbacks can't quite calibrate that properly. Not everyone is like Peyton Manning who, yeah, he throws four interceptions sometimes, but he kind of needed to press the ball a lot in those sorts of situations. Then you can go plenty of games without today. Not everyone has that.

So whenever you can take that away, that ability, you know, having to have that calibration away, which is very difficult for quarterbacks from them, you can play yourself into a lot more games. And that's when I think his running can come into play. Can they convince him to run? Will he be convinced to run? Maybe. Maybe for a rehabilitation of his career, it might be necessary to do that a little bit more often.

Yeah, there are too many plays on his tape over his entire career where, let's say, I mean, this year against Carolina, like you're winning the game and you're in the red zone. And all you need to do is just not have a catastrophic mistake. And he scrambles and he tries to make a play and there's a defender on him. And he just sort of flips. it up, it gets tipped, it gets intercept in, gives Carolina another chance. Like, that's not necessary.

But that's also, Sam Darnold did the same stuff in his career before that. And the Vikings were able to even it out a little, even though you can never sort of take that entirely out of a player. So let's, let's bottom line this a little bit on Kyler Murray. If he's healthy for the vast majority of the season, the over under on Fandul right now is eight and a half for the Minnesota Vikings. their roster has not gotten better anywhere else. I can't say it's gotten that much worse, though.

I mean, they lost Jonathan Allen, who was a bottom quarter of the league defensive tackle, and they lost Javon Hargrave, who was a mid-defensive tackle. Aside from that, they pretty much have most of the roster back. They are pretty lacking in depth. I also think most teams are pretty lacking in depth. What's the upside and what's the kind of, I mean, analytics folks are always sort of looking for the most likely. So what's like the highest end of this?

And what's the most likely if Kyler, based on his past history, plays like himself with this team? I mean, I might be a little bit higher than consensus on how well he can play. Because I think that, again, this rushing factor that we haven't seen and the team change that we, the new system and potential for bringing down that volume, we haven't really seen either. Of course, it could always flip, flip the other way. So maybe there's a little bit more uncertainty when it comes to something like that.

So I would be a little bit higher than average performance for the Vikings. Now, the thing that's going to hold me back a bit is that I typically give less credit to year-over-year consistency in defense. Maybe since we've seen a couple of years now, that that is not like part of a typical formulation when you're looking at the consistency is to say, well, if we have multiple years and if we have whatever personnel, and if we have whatever coaching, and if there's a lot of different ifs to come in there. And the problem is if you study those sorts of things, then you get down to such small samples and probably some bias in some sort of way

that it's not necessarily telling you a lot. But the assumption would have to be, it's better to have more stability than it is to have less stability there. Now, another thing is improvement in terms of, you know, we got rid of a player who wasn't playing well and now we have a player. I mean, that's kind of every single team. Maybe that's part of the reason it gets,

the people riled up on the improvement indexes, they'll say, what are you talking about? We got rid of the bad players and we brought in players who weren't bad. Well, if everyone is doing that, then you can't theoretically all be better. So I think that's going to wash out a little bit in the details. But again, top half is good with also the caveat that the, I mean, the division is just good, right? Right. I mean, I think the play has just been so strong, the division. And I think the NFC generally, there's been an uptick there, maybe vis-a-vis the

AFC from what we've seen it in previous years that it'll be interesting to see where they pan out. But I think slightly above average or above average is a good outcome. I do think there maybe is a bit more upside though with Kyler because of how he can change the way he plays. One of the main discussions about Kyler, which I think is overstated having watched his games, but I think there's truth to it is Kevin O'Connell and adapting to Kyler Murray. And I think your interpretation is lower the volume on Kyler Murray.

It's not necessarily a, hey, don't run this, you know, dagger concept or whatever. It's more of just a larger philosophy of lowering his volume, kind of a little bit like Russell Wilson. Everyone thought it was better to let Russ cook. And then you actually, you know, it was probably better to play the way that you had figured out how to play. But I'm curious about O'Connell and evaluating him as a play caller, as an offensive mind. This is, to me, a really, really difficult thing to do for people. people in the numbers world. I've seen some folks try to figure out like a play caller type of metric, but I don't even

know how you really do that because there's so many moving parts and there's so many different players and the landscape is not the same. If everybody had the same set of players versus the same defenses, this would be much easier to figure out who was the best of the best. Well, how do we pick that apart? Like, how do we look at O'Connell and a potential impact on Kyler Murray? Because I think that there's some who are. argue, hey, like when he had a experienced quarterback like Sam Darnold, he overperformed

expectation by a lot. But then last year, you did not see the quarterback position come anywhere close to the performance that you would have expected when they made the move from Darnold to J.J. McCarthy. So how do we parse all that out using the numbers? Yeah. It's, it's really difficult to do it using the numbers. I mean, what you end up finding, and this is something that I looked into new coaching

hires, is there's, there's almost no. there really is no correlation between a good, you know, offensive coordinator who was outperformed, let's say, in that phase of, of the offense and in his previous position to how good he'll be as a head coach. Same thing for defensive coordinator. It's almost, you know, impossible to judge necessarily special teams with the variance that you have there. But it did find that a head coach who had been previously successful in the NFL was more likely to be successful again than a new hire.

So maybe in some ways for Kevin O'Connell, although we all want to focus on the scheme and the quarterbacks and everything else, the fact that I think he's performed fairly well than what you would have expected based upon maybe a preseason talent evaluation for different players. Maybe that generally is giving us a little bit more signal that he's a good head coach than necessarily what we've seen, specifically at positions or other things like that, just because it's a multi-factor. It's bringing in more and more factors. which he can have an influence on and then, you know, potentially add some value. So I think there's some confidence there. And of course, within the organization, I mean, I think he seems to be viewed pretty well

within the organization and without and outside of the organization. So that means something to me also. And I would also argue that, I mean, I have to take a little dig at the film guys, too, is that, you know, I think it's really hard to figure out on film what's going on with these guys, too, because I think what we end up seeing a lot is. is a film analysis, which will say, oh, they're, you know, this office coordinator is not doing this X thing. And it's like if 90% of the viewing public kind of agrees with you that they should be doing this,

do we think this is some knowledge that like doesn't, isn't percolating around inside of a professional head coach couldn't figure this out sort of thing. So again, there's a lot behind the scenes that we don't know what's going on to. So that's why I just look at everything in aggregate and say, you know, it seems like he runs a pretty good ship. So I think that's the most important thing. Yeah, I struggle with this a lot because in reality, I don't know if you've ever seen the Brian Scalibarini video where he beats this New York City baller and he 11 to nothing.

And he says one of the greatest lines in basketball history, I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me. And I think the same is actually true for most of the people trying to analyze the outside film versus Kevin O'Connell. Like you're much closer to the guy on the. the couch who just watches on Sunday, then you are to Kevin O'Connell. So, and I know this from sitting down with Kevin and having him break down some stuff for me for an article a couple of years ago. I mean, I already knew this anyway, because he's in the

NFL and he played and he coached for Sean McVeigh and he won a Super Bowl. And if you think he hasn't thought of the things that you're talking about, um, you'd probably be surprised. That doesn't mean he's perfect, of course. It doesn't mean we can't critique and we can't look at the data and we can't point to different stuff, but I think the idea that he couldn't possibly understand Kyler Murray's skill set and adapt things to it is pretty silly, actually, to throw that out there. Let me talk to you about J.J. McCarthy here because the numbers on McCarthy are what they are. The struggle I think a lot of people are having is accepting that those numbers have consequences, which is like bringing in a new starting quarterback and a veteran backup quarterback in Carson

went just in case J.J. McCarthy doesn't even prove himself to be QB2 in training camp. There's a lot of context that goes into it. There's injuries that's really tough on J.J. McCarthy. They played their backup left tackle in week two and he got smoked like nine different times. And there's a lot that goes into it, right? His lack of experience in college, they put so much pressure on him, which I think mattered to some extent. But the numbers are what they are.

how do we deal with those contextual things with the fact that he played like one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL and over his first 10 games if you do comparisons you end up with a lot of Mitch Trubiske's is what you get throughout history if you start comparing to J.J. McCarthy but do you look at what he did last year and say that's too small sample size to know or does it tell us what's going to happen in the future? I mean, with these questions generally, I lean, I guess, against the consensus by saying that it tells us more than maybe the consensus thinks there is. There's always more hope in some people's minds, which is fine. It's not that it doesn't exist. It probably just doesn't exist to the proportion that we think it does. I mean, if you think about it, there should be like some symmetry. For instance, when you have, you know, C.J. Stroud and Bryce Young in their first year, there'll be a, you know,

like, well, Bryce Young, he had all these things happening. He has his potential. He has this and that. So if you're saying that he has this potential to be vastly different than his performance as a rookie, that's fine if that's your. But then was anyone saying about C.J. Stroud, oh, wait, well, we have to wait and see. Nobody knows if he's going to be any good. Something, a situation like that. No, everyone was kind of penciling him in and saying, this is a top five quarterback in the NFL, including contract and things like that. And obviously, things didn't work out of that way. So it has to be able to to flow both directions. Now, the interesting with McCarthy, this is what's looking at the data maybe is a little bit less reliable than it would be in the past is,

what is a quarterback who is a quarterback who misses his entire first season due to injury? Now, if they're missing the first season or even significant portions of their rookie season and they're not injured, that's a bad sign, not only because you're getting less sample, but because they're not playing them and there's something going on, especially in today's NFL, that you're not playing them. So that's not the case. But at the same point of time, if a quarterback doesn't play at all as a rookie and comes in in their second season, but they're not injured,

I would expect them to play like a second year player. That would be my expectation. I mean, we're talking about Patrick Mahomes. I mean, he won the MVP as a second year. It wasn't like he was figuring things out like a rookie because he was practicing. He was learning. A lot of it is just learning how to be an NFL player, learning how to deal with the speed, learning how to be familiar in your environment there.

So should that be McCarthy? Should we have viewed his performance like a second year performance? So I would actually put it somewhere between a first and second year performance, and that makes it look relatively worse than a first 10 games of someone's career. So I might be a little bit lower for that reason. But again, there's some hypothesizing going into what I'm looking at here. And I think if it was just truly a rookie season of 10 games, a high draft pick, that would tell us something.

But we also might want to look at what the coaching staff is telling us. us because they they do see and they do no more than anyone else. And I'm guessing we're getting some negative vibes in that direction. Well, the fact that they went out and got a clear number one starting quarterback who was drafted first overall and has been a two-time pro bowler, that probably does serve. Yeah, yeah. And that's a type of situation where there are, if there are multiple interested parties, then you have to basically, you know, not guarantee that they're going to be a starter,

but essentially. Right. I mean, Murray, out of all the potential guys, was one of the, only ones that you would say is locked in as a starter. It would be Aaron Rogers or, I mean, maybe Kirk. Maybe Kirk shows up here if they wanted to bring him back. But other than that, I mean, there were plenty of options. There's a flaco.

There's a Marcus Mariotta. There's, you know, those guys are out there if you wanted a clear backup. And I agree with you that there's signal in the decision making and probably actually the strongest signal of everything that we can pick apart comes from, I've always said this, watch what they do, not necessarily listen to what. they say. And when they align, you're, you know, you've got the truth. But in this case, it's well, you know, it's a competition. It's not. It's Kyler Murray's world's better and much older and much more experience and has handled multiple different offenses at a high level and is

just a better football player at his best than J.J. McCarthy, more skilled, a better college performance. I mean, just pretty much everything across the board. The question though now is, Kevin, what do you do with J.J. McCarthy? Because there is a case for if he has this year to develop, you can sort of go back to, you know, point to zero or whatever where they wanted to be, which was they wanted him to develop behind Sam Darnold. You could have that as your backup quarterback and maybe he gets in some games because Kyler does have an injury history and maybe he plays five or six games and shows you

the progress you're looking at. There's also a case for just moving on from him. right now because you've gone out and gotten two other experienced quarterbacks instead of JJ McCarthy. And it's very possible that even Carson Wentz ends up as QB2. The San Francisco 49ers traded Trey Lance. Indianapolis is talking about trading Anthony Richardson. Is it too early?

Because I think it's, I think it's really shocking for Vikings fans. Like he played 10 games and now it's just like over. But it does kind of work that way sometimes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think what you have to do is do some different scenarios and just try to figure out, okay, let's say Kyler misses X amount of games. What's the likelihood we turn to McCarthy versus turn to Wentz? What would we need to see in order to make that decision?

If he does play well, now what? Now has that enhanced his trade value do we expect on some way? Are we going to keep him? If he did play well for a handful of games, would he still even be in contention for being the starter the next season? So it's kind of playing through all those things. And I think generally when you start to play through all those different scenarios and you combine it with the fact that this is a young quarterback who may want to be in a situation

where at least they're locked in as the number two quarterback somewhere to have that sort of chance and you start to go in all these things. You start to realize it's really threading the needle to the point that you're going to get maybe even so much better of a trade down the line after showcasing him a little bit more, where the draft capital differential that we're talking about is probably not going to be that significant either way, that I think most of the times washing your hands and letting someone go with the understanding that, hey, they could turn out to be a good quarterback, but you may be doing the best thing for all parties involved, even to do it at this point.

I think that's what it comes down to. I don't know what inside the building, what they think, that the realistic chance is, if Kyler misses five games and that that McCarthy will put himself in a position to be able to play so well that he really becomes a valuable asset for them going forward. I have a feeling we start to get into enough, you know, if-ifs into this situation, that it's a very, very low probability. One thing I do know is that if there's an evaluator out there who loved him coming out of the draft, they will keep loving him and they will keep loving him forever.

So there is that. I mean, I think trading him in preseason would be a bad idea because if Kyler Murray got hurt, then all you've got is Carson Wentz. And guess what happens to Carson Wentz every time he plays? He also gets hurt. And I know that the same is true for JJ McCarthy. I think you need all three just in case with three guys with some serious injury histories. But if you were to have, just for example, someone loses their quarterback for the year and they come with a second round pick in 2007,

where you might need that to move up in the draft. potentially, depending on what Kyler Murray wants for a contract or whatever, there's a lot of moving parts to this thing that I think that you should always wait a little too long before bailing on someone rather than do it too early when it comes to a quarterback because you never know. I mean, he could end up starting half the season or more. I mean, he got hurt in week five last year. And while they purposefully benched him to make sure they got a top draft pick,

he did miss the rest of the season. You might end up needing JJ McCarthy there. So I think it's a tough choice because it feels right now like it's over, but predicting into the future is hard in the NFL. Last thing before you go, improvement index. Who in the NFC North do you think got the most better? The most much, how much, the most better? Is that the way to phrase that?

The betterest? Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, you know, drum roll. I mean, it has the Vikings getting, getting the best. But again, that's highly based upon Kyler Murray. So the rest of the teams on here, I'm flowing down my chart here. Yeah, so the teams generally are looking pretty flat. I mean, the bears are pretty flat.

The lions are on the negative side and the Packers are also on the negative side, which is not surprising. There's also an inverse correlation between prior year performance and how good a team is going to perform. on the improvement index. So the Vikings should have a relative advantage over, over everyone else there. But again, you know,

sometimes those teams can have a little bit more depth based upon how they performed the year before. So guys can step in maybe in a better function than we'll end up seeing. But I do think when it comes to the Lions in particular, they have some structural contract stuff that's been, that they've been playing someone on easy mode for the last few seasons with the first year on a bunch of different contracts. And perhaps, you know, the drafts haven't been bad necessarily recently also.

But we're talking about we're going to restructure. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of push kicking into the future. And that just becomes a little bit more of a weight, a little bit more of an anchor that you're carrying each season. So that's always the team that I'm looking at, like, you know, things are only going to get more difficult for them this year versus last year and even last year versus the prior year. So interesting that when they had. a million top 100 picks and very, very high draft picks, they were good at drafting.

And then when they started winning, they didn't have as many picks. They didn't have as many high picks. They got worse at drafting. We're all looking for the answers here, Kevin. We're all trying to figure out how you hack the draft. Anyway, that's just, that's just Quasi era snark, because if you trade away all your draft picks and your team wins 13 games and 14 games in different seasons, it's really hard to find the next Nick Bosa.

See if this, you know, did you hear about this Brown's proposal for having five years of draft picks going on? Oh man, these guys, when they think that their jobs in jeopardy, they're going to be trading away, you know, 20, 50 picks pretty soon.

I thought what they're trying to do is get somebody to trade for Lamar or Joe Burrow and get those guys the heck out of the division or maybe because their draft picks are gone that they need, you know, to reach out into the future to try to get a quarterback since Cleveland has never had one, it seems. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, after the Sean Watson thing, they're just like, they just want,

they got to just go all in on someone else, I guess, eventually. So maybe also to try to move up in the draft. If it's, if it's possible, who knows? Kevin Cole, unexpected points. If you're looking for analytical data breakdowns, your stuff on the draft and correlations to the combine has been something I've used a ton when evaluating and analyzing options for the Vikings five draft picks and so forth. in recent years.

We actually have picks to break down this time, Kevin. So we'll be using it more. But make sure you go check that out and subscribe there. Kevin, really appreciate your time. Great to catch up, man. Great stuff. All right. It's been great.

Thanks.