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Kyler Murray is headed to the Arizona Cardinals — for a pre-draft visit, that is. According to NFL Network's Mike Garafolo, the presumptive No. 1 overall pick will be in Arizona today to meet with Cardinals officials.
It's conventional wisdom by now that Arizona is likely to kick things off on April 25th by making Murray the first pick in the draft. The team has walked back previous defenses of incumbent starting quarterback Josh Rosen recently, reportedly putting the tenth overall pick in last year's draft on the trading block. And despite rookie coach Kliff Kingsbury's insistence that his team has yet to make a decision on who it will select with the No. 1 pick, his glowing assessment of Murray's NFL potential last fall — when Kingsbury, then at Texas Tech, said he would “take him [Murray] with the first pick in the draft if I could — has long made it seem the reigning Heisman Trophy winner is destined to be Arizona's new franchise signal-caller.
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A first-year starter in 2018, Murray set the NCAA on fire en route to leading the Oklahoma Sooners to the College Football Playoff, throwing for 4,361 yards, 42 touchdowns, and seven interceptions while completing 69.0 percent of his passes. He also rushed for 1,001 yards and 12 touchdowns. But despite those gaudy statistics and his extremely rare combination of arm talent and overall athleticism, Murray is far from the consensus top prospect in the 2019 draft. Some evaluators don't even think he's the draft's top quarterback, wary of his height and supposed lack of comfort playing from the pocket.
The chance those concerns will dissuade Kingsbury and the Cardinals from selecting Murray at the top of the draft, though, seems increasingly unlikely.
