Murray Up and Wait: NFC North Preview

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**Mina Kimes** (0:34)
Welcome back to The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny. Only NFL podcast. One of the hosts wants to take a fight out of CJ Ham. That's Lenny, I mean, at times.
Carmen Vitali. You didn't change your name, right? You just got married.

**Carmen Vitali** (0:48)
I legally, it's changed.

**Mina Kimes** (0:50)
Okay. Well.

**Carmen Vitali** (0:51)
But no, professionally, no, we're sticking with Carmen Vitali.

**Mina Kimes** (0:54)
Carmen Vitali is here again to help me preview the NFC North. So excited, not just because you're here, this is a division that is near and dear to your heart. You are very familiar with all these teams. But because we've got news, just in the brink of time, literally, I was pushing this division and the AFC North back, back, back because of the quarterback competitions. And I was convinced I have the Viking stuff I had ready to go. I was ready to talk about both quarterbacks. And then literally an hour before we started taping, it was reported, announced.
Kyler Murray will be the quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings.

**Carmen Vitali** (1:33)
The football gods must love you, Lena.

**Mina Kimes** (1:36)
What a blessing. So I figure we would start with the Vikings. Since it's easy and maybe we can talk a little bit about how we got here, what it means, the offense. It's been, I've been following the Vikings Beat Reporters accounts of practice scrimmages so closely.
And to put, I guess, my understanding read on it after talking to some of them, is that kind of over the course of the last few weeks, it looked like Kyler clearly had the lead. And then there was a scrimmage, I believe.

**Carmen Vitali** (2:12)
Yeah, this past weekend.

**Mina Kimes** (2:14)
Kyler wasn't so great. So then there was a question, maybe this will drag out a little bit, maybe it will go into the preseason. Not that the reporters thought that, I just think from the outside. But no, Vikings decided to call it early. So let's just start there before we get into what this means for the offense, for the team.
Obviously, when they traded for Kyler, or not traded for him, just signed him for nothing. I was a big fan of the move because it was so low cost, low risk, and because he has been at minimum an average quarterback, which is obviously a vast improvement. What do you make of this? Also, as a reporter, what do you make of them announcing it now? Because I was a little surprised.

**Carmen Vitali** (2:51)
I know.
I thought that the decision should come sooner rather than later. Actually, I was on the Irish NFL show last week talking about how I think they would benefit from just making this decision early and making sure that Kyler knows he's the guy going forward and the team knows that he's the guy going forward. Because even coming out of camp, all the players were insisting that this was still a competition and that they didn't know which way it was going and this, that, the other. You want as much continuity and as many reps as possible with the guy that you're going to carry into the season as the starter. I think that there's really nothing to be gained from, I guess, the outside noise of like, is this happening? I think maybe there was stuff to be gained from JJ McCarthy's camp, and that if he really took this down to the wire, that maybe that there was something salvageable there. But at the end of the day, him losing this quarterback battle to Kyler Murray, doesn't really bode well for his trade ability. I don't know that that's going to happen anytime soon. I don't think that that's the feeling out of Minnesota either. Doing it now, I think makes a lot of sense, and I'm glad that they did because now we can get rid of that whole narrative and just focus on who this team is moving forward with Kyler Murray. You kind of alluded to it. If he's even average, if we get the 2024 Kyler Murray that I think was 14th in EPA per play, this team can be fine. This team could not only be fine, this team could potentially win the division. I think I've gotten there as far as after rewatching them.