Minnesota Vikings Training Camp: Kyler Murray sets the tone with quarterback competition with J.J. McCarthy
Training camp has begun for the Minnesota Vikings, and Kevin O’Connell is already living up to his word.
The Minnesota Vikings have completed their first training camp practice, meaning the quarterback competition between J.J. McCarthy and Kyler Murray is officially underway.
Head coach Kevin O’Connell spoke on Tuesday about the competition, and made it clear that it will be thorough, even if it’s not necessarily 50-50.
“I will say this, and I told the quarterbacks, we don’t need to make this 50-50,” said O’Connell. “When we get into some longer practices, there’s some move-the-ball periods. There’s some periods where the amount of plays is unknown sometimes as you really start to get into what real football is. So there may be some where, by the day, it’s going to be hard to really quantify. Because as practices get going, it’s it’s not that exact science, but over the sequence of many days or as many days as we hope to have before we make a decision, I know we’ll be thorough.”
Kyler Murray gets first reps in practice
One thing that we didn’t know was who would get the first practice reps. That would likely give us some kind of indication on where things stand going into the competition. Murray got the first reps in 11-0n-11s and quickly ripped a 30-yarder to wide receiver Jordan Addison.
That’s what the Vikings were expecting to see from Murray when they signed him back in March. Now, it’s important to know that O’Connell did talk about, not necessarily doing things 50/50 from a snap perspective, but rather being fair. They did get close to the same amount of reps, per ESPN’s Kevin Seifert.
“On the first day of their training camp quarterback competition, the Vikings were true to their word: Kyler Murray and J.J. McCarthy rotated evenly during team drills. There were two sets of 11-on-11 drills Wednesday. Murray took the first eight snaps, four coming with the first team and four coming with the second team. McCarthy then took the next eight under the same parameters. The second set was cut short, leaving McCarthy with only four snaps.
“That brought the Day 1 total to 16 total snaps for Murray and 12 for McCarthy.”
You can look at Murray getting the first snaps in team drills one of two ways:
- Murray has the early lead in the competition based of everything we’ve seen
- They wanted to see quicker how much he knows the system
Honestly, it’s likely that both are true, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of the competition as a whole. Things can change on a daily basis, as they both will have fluctuations on a practice-by-practice basis, which is why looking at the big picture overview is going to be so important.
Day one has them still around the same place, and we will see how that changes each day.
