From the moment quarterback Kyler Murray joined the Vikings, it seemed as if the starting job was his to lose. On Tuesday, he officially won it.
Although coach Kevin O’Connell called it a “true competition,” only the coaching staff and the organization know if it was a truly open competition.
It was impossible to do an accurate blow-by-blow comparison of who was “winning,” because outsiders aren’t privy to the plans that were put in place for pairing the offense and the defense as to any of the various reps.
In announcing the decision to go with Murray, O’Connell credited the role of defensive coordinator Brian Flores, “from a standpoint of looks that, you know, we gave the guys different challenges on different days while letting them kind of compete at the same stride early on.”
Without knowing whether the defensive looks were specifically planned to make it harder for one candidate and/or easier for another, tracking the raw practice stats meant nothing.
O’Connell, working with Flores, may have been making it a little harder for Murray to see how he handled an unexpected curveball, in the form of a defense that was designed to shut down the play that was called. And O’Connell may have been giving J.J. McCarthy combinations of offensive and defensive play calls aimed at giving him a chance to have a good rep.
The point is that there’s no way of knowing whether it was easier or harder at any given moment for either Murray or McCarthy. And there’s no way of knowing that the overall goal was to get the team to see enough to support the possibly predetermined conclusion that McCarthy would be taking a backseat to a newly-arrived veteran.
The timing of the announcement — the Tuesday before the first preseason game — was the most sensible day for declaring the competition to be over. In lieu of giving both guys a preseason game with the first-team offense, O’Connell decided to call it and to pivot to getting Murray ready for Week 1.
If it was a truly open competition, the Vikings possibly would have given both guys a chance to perform in something much closer to real game situations before making a decision. Instead, they saw enough to make the decision that seemed to have been tentatively made when Murray was signed, even if the drip-drip of the practice accounts from media and fans suggested McCarthy had a real shot of winning it.
McCarthy, in all fairness, lost it last year, both by the things that everyone could see during games and the stuff that happens out of the public eye that surely factored into O’Connell’s decision that it was time to take the team in a different direction. Tuesday’s decision was the next logical step in an effort to generate the kind of quality and consistency in quarterback play that the Vikings didn’t have last year, when they decided not to have a proven veteran around to get McCarthy to step up — or to step off.