Kyler Murray getting a big shot to put the Arizona Cardinals on the map

The Arizona Cardinals are already an interesting team because of Kyler Murray, but he can put them on the map with a win Thursday night.

Very quietly in 2019, the Arizona Cardinals have been creeping their way back into relevance, and for more reasons than just the fact that Kyler Murray is on the roster and Kliff Kingsbury is the head coach.

Not a lot was expected of Arizona from outsiders in 2019. This is a team that finished with the worst record in the league last year, hired a recently fired college head coach to be their lead-man, abandoned a 2018 first-round pick for a guy who was going to go play pro baseball, and were probably giving GM Steve Keim his last shot to succeed.

Keim put every chip he had in the middle of the table by hiring Kingsbury and drafting Murray, and while the Cardinals are seemingly a long way off in the extremely talented NFC West, are they really?

2019 NFC West Standings

• San Francisco 49ers: 7-0
• Seattle Seahawks: 6-2
• Los Angeles Rams: 5-3
• Arizona Cardinals: 3-4-1

The Cardinals are quietly hanging right around there at 3-4-1, and while they’d likely have to win the vast majority of the rest of their games to compete for a playoff spot in 2019, they could at least set themselves up with a good amount of hope for the future, starting on Thursday night at home against the San Francisco 49ers.

The 49ers are one of the NFL’s hottest teams right now, led by one of the smartest head coaches in the league in Kyle Shanahan. Shanahan’s ability to manipulate defenses with his tremendous play calling has been his calling card for more than a decade, and he’s got one of the league’s best defenses now to back him up.

But the odds of the 49ers or any team in the NFL going undefeated are pretty slim. They’re bound to run into a problem at some point, and that problem could very well by the dynamic Kyler Murray and the Arizona Cardinals.

Murray hasn’t been putting up video game-like numbers in his rookie season with the Cardinals, but he’s shown us flashes of the brilliance we thought he was capable of coming out of Oklahoma with tremendous accuracy, ball placement, timing, athleticism, and the ability to extend drives by using his legs.

Murray is such a dynamic presence athletically, the 49ers will have all they can handle just dealing with him being able to escape the pocket.

The Cardinals may not ultimately make any noise in the playoff race this season, but Murray could undoubtedly put Arizona on the map with a signature win against a team with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations.

A win on Thursday night would give the Cardinals faithful plenty to be excited about as this team continues building its new foundation around Murray. Murray was brought in with the number one overall pick because he’s the most dynamic playmaker in this rookie class offensively.

Getting to go up against the player many felt was the top prospect in the draft in Nick Bosa on a team in your division, playing at home, all of the odds against you?

This is the moment Murray was drafted for. The Cardinals may not win the Super Bowl this year, but this game is one they’ll keep looking back to as a turning point for the better if they can win it.