Buffalo Bills fans should prepare for some frustration watching Kyler Murray’s running ability in Sunday’s game.
The Cardinals’ second-year quarterback is going to gain yards on scrambles and designed running plays. It’s just about impossible to shut down.
Murray ranks eighth in the NFL in rushing yards and No. 1 among quarterbacks with 543 yards. He’s No. 1 among all rushers in yards per carry at 7.1. He has 12 rushes of 15 or more yards, also No. 1 among all players.
The Bills did a great job of having coordinated pass rushes last week to keep Seattle’s Russell Wilson from running wild on scrambles. He rushed for a mere 5 yards. If a defensive end is going to try to win on a hard move inside, he better know he has a defensive tackle looping to his outside or a linebacker to his outside to keep Murray from taking off. The Bills managed it well against Wilson.
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Arizona’s designed runs for Murray are an interesting challenge.
Murray runs on a bunch of zone-read plays, lead draws, designed sweeps and naked bootlegs on the Bills.
By now, the Bills’ defense has tons of experience defending the zone read, where the quarterback hands to the running back on an inside zone play or keeps it off tackle.
The QB draw with the running back leading the quarterback through the hole as an extra blocker is a great play that has become more prevalent in the NFL in recent years.
Arizona uses spread formations at least 70% of the time. Murray is seeing light boxes from the defense. With the running back leading Murray through the hole, it’s an extra blocker that almost guarantees Arizona is getting a hat on a hat. Sometimes the Cardinals will run a jet sweeper in the direction of the running back, so Murray has two lead blockers against a light box.
(Here's Murray following a jet sweeper for a TD last week against Miami.)
The only way to stop the play is for the defensive front to win a one-on-one matchup.
“That’s exactly what I would say – somebody’s got to find a way to get off a block and make a play,” said Bills safety Jordan Poyer. “At the same time, you’ve got to be able to hit him when the opportunity presents itself and force him to not want to run the ball. When we get clean shots on him, we’ve got to find ways to hit him.”
Here's a misdirection Murray TD run against Washington with the RB leading the way:
The Baltimore Ravens run the play with Lamar Jackson, but often out of two tight-end formations. The Bills run it out of the spread, too. Josh Allen hit good gainers with Zack Moss as the lead blocker vs. Kansas City and in the home win over the Jets.
“I think it’s fairly new to the NFL, the called quarterback run game,” Arizona coach Kliff Kingsbury said on a call with Buffalo media this week. “It kind of for a while had been thought to be impossible to do consistently because of the physicality of the game, and there is some truth to that. These guys, Lamar and Josh and Kyler, are able to make it work. That definitely adds a weapon each and every week. It’s something in college you see a lot more and defenses prep for it a lot more. But it’s hard to prep for it in the NFL because you don’t see it as often.”
Murray is averaging about six designed runs a game, according to Buffalo News charting. He hit Miami last week for 41 yards on four designed runs and got Dallas for 52 yards on six designed runs three weeks ago. Six of his eight rushing TDs have come on designed runs.
Murray is a relatively small guy at 5 feet, 10 inches and 207 pounds. Baltimore’s Jackson is 6 feet, 2 inches and 215 pounds. Allen is 6 feet, 5 inches and 237.
“I’ve never seen a guy take less hits,” former Bills and Jets coach Rex Ryan told ESPN Radio earlier this year. “As soon as he scrambles, don't worry about it Arizona Cardinals fans, he's not going to get hurt. He does not get touched. He either slides on the ground as a great baseball player, he gets out of bounds or he sticks it in the end zone. You are not touching him.”
Carolina did a good job defending Murray in a 31-21 win over the Cardinals in Week 4. The Panthers’ front four lost containment on a spectacular 48-yard scramble by Murray. But Carolina dropped back, played coverage and got a big game from its front four. Maybe the Bills can do the same.
Air Raid report: Kingsbury got the Arizona job after five years running the Air Raid offense at Texas Tech. The Air Raid is a spread offense approach that has its roots in the offenses pioneered by AFL legend Sid Gilman and the ones more recently run at full speed by Mike Leach, now at Mississippi State. Leach’s approach is: If you spread the field vertically and horizontally with receivers, no zone defense can cover them all. There’s too much space to cover.
Among the popular elements of the Air Raid are four vertical routes, three-level flood concepts, and the mesh concept, which has two receivers running shallow crossers close to each other from opposite directions, all borrowed from past offensive schemes. The Bills and most teams have run all of these things to various degrees.
In the early part of last season, the Cardinals were truer to the Air Raid, running four- and five-wide sets in a pass-happy approach. The Cards offense struggled. But Kingsbury adjusted. They ran the ball more, and now they use two tight ends 31% of the time. Arizona runs on 53% of its plays, seventh most in the league.
One potential weakness of going from the spread so much is a good defense can force the QB to get rid of the ball quickly. Everything has to be quick, and the QB and receivers better be precise.
Pressure, not sacks. Don’t expect a lot of sacks on Murray. He has been sacked only 10 times, the seventh lowest rate in the league. It’s a huge improvement from last season, when he took 48 sacks, the eighth most in the league. Miami blitzed him a ton last week, unsuccessfully, and he recognized free rushers off the edge well.
“I think that is an area he’s taken a lot of pride in,” Kingsbury said. “When you look at the sack numbers, just avoiding the negative plays, that’s been huge. We talk about third down, you try to make a play, and if you get sacked there, it’s not as big a deal. But first down and second down, negative yardage plays are real killers in this league. He’s done a tremendous job of improving on that this season.”
The 30,000-foot view: The Cardinals were one of the worst franchises in the NFL under Bill Bidwill, who assumed control of the team in 1962 and ran it until 2007, when he ceded control to his son Michael. The franchise made the playoffs just three times in 59 years, from 1949 through 2007. But Michael Bidwill has been a much more stable, savvy leader. He pulled the plug on coach Steve Wilks after just one season, 2018, and followed the NFL trend toward hotshot, young, offensive minds in hiring Kingsbury. That led to admitting they made a mistake in drafting QB Josh Rosen and the selection of Murray No. 1 overall in 2019. Good luck is a factor. If Wilks had won one more game, the Cardinals wouldn’t have had the No. 1 pick. But now it looks like Murray will make them competitive for years to come.
Stats for the road: From NFL Next Gen Stats, Allen and Murray are Nos. 1 and 2 in the league in evading pressure. Allen has done it 29.2%, Murray 28.1%. Third is Matt Ryan at 17.9%. It’s the percentage of dropbacks where the QB was under pressure during the play but avoided it at the time of the throw. ... The Bills remain No. 1 in first-down passing rate in the first three quarters (61%), and they’re the second most successful first-down passing team, according to Sharp Football. They’re averaging 9.2 yards per attempt on those throws. Arizona passes 46% on first down in the first three quarters. ... Arizona is running no-huddle on 41% of its snaps, by far the most in the league.
