Arizona Cardinals
Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray said early in the offseason that he feels fully recovered from his 2022 torn ACL and that makes him want to run more this season in order to unleash the full potential of the team’s offense.
Murray’s goals didn’t change over the course of the team’s offseason program and it has veteran safety Budda Baker excited about what’s to come in the fall. Baker told Mina Kimes of ESPN that he thinks Murray has become underrated because he hasn’t been utilizing his full skill set and that seeing him put it all into play this spring is “definitely exciting” because of what it will mean once it is time to play games.
“He’s kind of been in his bag this whole offseason, doing no-look throws and having a great offseason training camp,” Baker said. “K1, he’s going to run a little bit more. A little outside the pocket, inside the pocket throws. He’s going to kind of do it all and he’s going to get all his guys the rock.”
The Cardinals won eight games last season after posting eight over the previous two seasons, so the arrow is pointing up in Arizona. Murray staying in his bag for the rest of the year would be a good way to push them even higher in 2025.
Tuesday was an interesting day. More interesting days could be coming.
After the NFL and NFL Players Association managed to hide the 61-page ruling in a landmark collusion arbitration for more than five months, the cat is out of the bag. And some players are paying attention.
Multiple individuals who routinely interact with players tell PFT that multiple players have begun to inquire regarding their rights, and regarding their options both as to the league and as to the union.
As one source with knowledge of the collusion grievance told PFT, Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert would be the perfect plaintiff against either entity. The exchange between Chargers owner Dean Spanos and Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill shows coordination (i.e., collusion) between two owners regarding the contracts given to Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert and Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray.
The threshold question becomes whether Herbert is within the additional 594 veteran players for whom damages were sought in the collusion grievance, beyond Murray, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, and Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson. There’s a still-hidden list of 594 names that was attached as an exhibit to the 61-page ruling. The league would argue that, as to those players, the issue has been concluded.
The counter would be that discovery was taken only as to the three quarterbacks. From Herbert’s perspective, there could be a treasure trove of communications within the Chargers organization regarding whether Herbert will (or did) want a fully-guaranteed deal, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Deshaun Watson fully-guaranteed contract.
The other 593 players (if Herbert’s name is on the list) could make the same argument. They would ask, essentially, how did my rights get caught up in and extinguished by the three-quarterback collusion case when I never had a chance to prove that the clear effort to encourage collusion resulted in a specific effort by my team to restrict guarantees in my deal?
The union faces a different problem. The claim by the specific members of the NFLPA would fall under the federal duty of fair representation. And there would be at least two different potential avenues, as we see it.
For the 594 players whose rights were tied up in (and extinguished by) the existing case, they would (or at least could) argue that the union failed to properly develop and investigate their grievances by simply lumping them in with the three main claimants and without fully investigating the claims. For all anyone knows, there are internal smoking-gun texts or emails as to any, some, or all of the 594 players that would say, for example, “I know [Player X] wants a fully-guaranteed contract, but the Management Council told all teams to limit guarantees. We need to comply.”
For the players not within the group of 594 who were added (presumably unbeknownst to them) to the case, there’s a different issue. Because the union hid the outcome from them (and everyone else) for more than five months, their 50-day window under the Collective Bargaining Agreement for filing a non-injury grievance based on the key finding of the collusion case has expired.
This assumes that the NFL and NFLPA didn’t enter into a tolling agreement that would acknowledge their mutual effort to keep the collusion decision secret and give any other players who choose to proceed a fresh 50 days from whenever the decision sees the light of day. Neither the NFL nor the NFLPA responded to the question of whether a tolling agreement exists.
Our guess is that there’s no such agreement, and that the NFLPA has — in their effort for whatever reason to hide the outcome of the case — hampered if not defeated the effort of any other player who signed a contract before today from using the collusion ruling as the starting point for a grievance of their own.
So what will happen next? It’s up to the players. And it will be up to whether any lawyers out there see the merit in litigation against the NFL and/or the NFLPA and choose to pursue it on behalf of the players.
Until that happens, the NFL and NFLPA will (or should) be sweating out the potential ramifications of the players finally knowing about the thing that was inexplicably hidden from them.
Cardinals tight end Trey McBride is at the Tight End University summit this week, sharing thoughts with other tight ends from around the NFL, and he said a discussion with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce was particularly inspiring.
McBride said on ESPN that Kelce talked about his connection with Patrick Mahomes and how a tight end can make himself the quarterback’s best friend. McBride said that he believes he and Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray can develop the same kind of ability to work together that the Chiefs have with Kelce and Mahomes.
“Travis, he would always give us his nuggets on being friendly to the quarterback,” McBride said. “Make sure you and your quarterback are on the same page. He plays with a little freedom. Him and Mahomes have a nice connection and I kind of took that and was like, ‘Why can’t Kyler and I have that same connection?’ I feel like that’s what I’ve tried to do. I’ve tried to have that same relationship and that growth with Kyler and just continue to make plays for him and be that security blanket where if he needs somewhere to go with the ball, he always can throw it to me and that’s what I’m trying to do for him.”
McBride made his first Pro Bowl last season and was rewarded with a four-year, $76 million contract extension. The Cardinals expect Murray and McBride to connect for many years in Arizona. McBride thinks they can have one of the best connections in the NFL.
The Cardinals announced their 2025 training camp schedule.
They will have nine open practices, with the first public practice on Thursday, July 24.
Admission and parking are free, but digital tickets will be required for entry into each practice. Once reserved, the tickets will be accessible via the Cardinals mobile app.
Visit www.azcardinals.com/camptix to reserve tickets.
The Cardinals will host the team’s annual “Red & White Practice” on Saturday, Aug. 2.
The team’s “Back Together Weekend” practice on Sunday, July 27, will be open exclusively for Cardinals’ season ticket members and club seat members. Additional information about tickets for that special practice will be sent in an e-mail to those members.
The Cardinals’ final open practice is Wednesday, Aug. 6.
The 61-page ruling in the landmark collusion grievance features an unprecedented peek behind the NFL’s curtain, in various ways.
Regarding the 2022 negotiations that culminated in a second contract for Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray, the ruling contains a text exchange that directly contradicts System Arbitrator Christopher Droney’s conclusion that the league’s encouragement to collude didn’t take. (Droney, as seen later, disagrees.)
On July 22, 2022 — one day after word of Murray’s non-fully-guaranteed contract surfaced — Chargers owner Dean Spanos texted Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill.
From the document:
Spanos: “Congratulations on signing Murray.”
Bidwill: “Thanks Deno! These QB deals are expensive but we limited the fully guaranteed money and have some pretty good language. Thankfully, we have a QB that’s worth paying.”
Spanos: “Your deal helps us for our QB next year.”
Bidwill: “I think many teams will be happy with it once they have a chance to review. Cleveland really screwed things up, but I was resolved to keep the guaranteed [money] relatively ‘low.’”
As evidence of collusion/coordination among supposedly competing businesses goes, the gun doesn’t get much more smoky than that. If the Chargers and Cardinals (and the other 30 franchises) are truly in competition, why would they coordinate? Why would they care?
Does the board chairman at Coke call the board chairman at Pepsi when Pepsi hires a CEO whose compensation package reverses a potential trend regarding CEO pay? That’s exactly what happened with Spanos and Bidwill.
Droney’s written ruling ignores the obvious import of the coordinator between Spanos and Bidwill. Writes Droney, in the portion of the ruling that systematically dismisses what seems to be important circumstantial evidence of collusion in action, “Neither do texts or emails from owners about contract negotiations show that they were participating in a plan to reduce guarantees. In the text exchange between Mr. Bidwill and Mr. Spanos, Mr. Bidwill recognizes that other teams will be pleased with the fact that the Cardinals kept the guaranteed money in Mr. Murray’s [contract] relatively low, and Mr. Spanos acknowledges that doing so will help the Chargers in upcoming negotiations with their quarterback (Justin Herbert) presumably because they could use Mr. Murray’s contract, rather than Mr. [Deshaun] Watson’s, as a reference point. . . . These communications are more in line with ‘independent response to common stimuli, or mere interdependence unaided by an advance understanding among the parties,’ rather than participation in a collusive agreement.”
Again, do competing businesses in the same industries so casually compare notes about the compensation of key employees? Do they try to do deals that will help the others do better deals?
How was Droney so blind to that?
It should be obvious to anyone with any basic common sense. The NFL “encouraged” (told) them to collude. The communications between Spanos and Bidwill are circumstantial evidence that they did.
And that evidence is now available for anyone and everyone to see.
For the second consecutive year, Justin Reid has beaten Kyler Murray in the finals of a chess tournament for current and former NFL players.
The tournament, known as Blitzchamps, saw Reid top Murray to emerge victorious from an eight-man field that also included Justin Herbert, Mack Hollins, Richard Sherman, Rashawn Slater, AJ Dillon and Harrison Phillips.
Reid, the first two-time champion of the annual event, said he sees the mental approach to chess as similar to the mental approach to football.
“I love [chess]. I’m obsessed with it. I play it almost every day,” Reid said, via TheAthletic.com. “Whenever we’re getting ready to play a game [in the NFL] and you start to get excited because you know that moment is coming where you’re about to go into combat with your brothers, I play one or two games to calm myself down and bring myself back to peace because I play my best when I’m calm and thinking clearly, rather then when I’m jacked up on emotion. So in those two ways, the games are very similar. You get too emotional and you make mistakes, a blunder here and there. If you stay calm under pressure, it ends up translating pretty well. . . . Sometimes you can see what your opponent is about to do before they do it. Both on the chess board and football field so you do a move to counter that before they even get to it.”
The prize for Reid was a $30,000 donation to his foundation, JReid Indeed, which provides opportunities to disadvantaged young people in Houston and Kansas City, the two cities Reid has called home in the NFL, as well as in Baton Rouge, where Reid was born and raised. After four seasons with the Texans and three with the Chiefs, Reid returned to his native Louisiana and signed with the Saints this offseason.
Calais Campbell returned to the Cardinals as a free agent this offseason and the veteran defensive lineman thinks he still has plenty to add to the team on the field.
That’s not the only way Campbell hopes to help the team in 2025, however. Campbell is heading into his 18th professional season and he’s learned a lot of lessons over the course of his two decades in the league.
One of his goals for his return to Arizona is to make sure he teaches as many of those lessons to his teammates as he can.
“I enjoy passing knowledge,” Campbell said, via the team’s website. “I feel there is no point for me to die with all this knowledge, to the graveyard at the end of my career. I have to share with as many people as possible. Especially people that are going to help us win ballgames. If I help them to a level that’s better than me, then the team is better and I will find my role and make it work.”
The Cardinals drafted Darius Robinson in the first round in 2024 and they added Walter Nolen this year, so they will likely be at the top of the list of students that the Cardinals would like to see soak up the wisdom that Campbell has picked up over the years. If they become cornerstones for the franchise, Campbell’s legacy in Arizona will be even richer.
James Conner dominated the running back work for the Cardinals in 2024, but Trey Benson has eyes on changing that in 2025.
Benson was a third-round pick last year and he carried the ball 63 times for 291 yards and a touchdown during his rookie season. Conner ran the ball 236 times and added 47 catches while posting more than 1,500 yards from scrimmage, but Benson thinks that his year of experience and his offseason work have positioned him for a move up the depth chart.
“I feel like I’ll get more opportunities and help James out more,” Benson said, via Bob McManaman of the Arizona Republic. “I feel like we can have two RB1s on this team, and that’s my mindset this year is two RB1s.”
Conner seems ready to cede some work to his younger teammate. He called Benson “a freak athlete” and said the second-year player has been “working his butt off” to show how much he’s grown since joining the team. It remains to be seen how all of that will play out in game action, but the Cardinals may have a new wrinkle to their offense this fall.
Mike Tyson once said of boxing that everyone has a plan to win a fight until they get punched in the face and something similar can be said of NFL offenses.
A lot of work goes into scripting play calls that highlight the strength of your team, but plotting out plays on paper is very different from what winds up happening on the field on gameday. Teams need to be able to improvise and that’s something Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray has shown a flair for over the course of his career.
Cardinals offensive coordinator Drew Petzing said this week that “we want to make sure we are taking advantage” of Murray’s ability to make decisions on the fly and Murray said that’s something the team has been working on as they prepare for the 2025 season.
“You get to the NFL, there are just better athletes,” Murray said, via the team’s website. “Guys are smarter, angles are different. So anytime I can get in space on this level, I love it. That’s a point of emphasis not only for me but for Drew to find ways to get me out in space, scramble drills, stuff like that. We have to be better in off-schedule plays. I have the ability to extend plays and we have the guys to go do it.”
The Cardinals’ offense took a step forward last season and maximizing Murray’s ability to turn chaotic moments into big gains would be an effective way to build on those strides.
Free agent offensive tackle D.J. Humphries agreed to terms with the 49ers on April 29 but never signed. His representation, AMDG Sports, announced on social media Thursday that Humphries is signing with the Rams.
The Rams have Alaric Jackson as their starting left tackle and Rob Havenstein at right tackle.
Humphries signed with the Chiefs on Nov. 23, 2024, after recovering from a torn ACL late in the 2023 season. The Chiefs anticipated Humphries taking over at left tackle, but in his first game, which came in Week 14, he injured his hamstring.
Humphries returned in Week 18 to play 32 snaps, but he played no offensive snaps in the postseason as Joe Thuney moved from guard to left tackle. Humphries, 31, did play nine special teams snaps in the team’s first two postseason games. He did not get on the field in the Super Bowl.
The Cardinals made Humphries a first-round pick in 2015, and he made the Pro Bowl in 2021. He started 98 games in his nine seasons in Arizona.