Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray single-handidly fueled the Cards to overtime, and a fumble by Las Vegas Raiders receiver Hunter Renfrow was returned for a touchdown to cap the Cardinals 29-23 victory.
The Cardinals were down 20 at halftime, and scored 16 unanswered points during the 4th quarter to force the game to overtime, where some more improbably heroics ensued to give the Cardinals the win.
“I didn’t want to risk [it],” Murray said, according to ESPN’s Josh Weinfuss. “The game was too important. I thought it was smarter to take the delay of game. I don’t want to waste this play and give them a free one, because we weren’t ready or we all discombobulated at the end.
“I didn’t think that was smart.”
“He’s a special talent,” Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury said of Murray. “You can see when he’s able to do his thing, that’s what he does, and he had some tremendous plays, and the numbers may not be great, [but] we don’t care about numbers.”
But the game winning play came when Cardinals cornerback Byron Murphy Jr. scooped up the fumble and returned it for a touchdown to end the game.
“Everything was a blur,” Murphy said. “I just saw the end zone. ‘I gotta get to the end zone to end this game,’ that’s the first thing I was thinking the whole time.”
“But now that I’ve seen that, I’m taking that ball all the way to the house, to the crib, back to Arizona,” Murphy said.
Murray’s scrambling and elusiveness paid off as he was able to run the ball into the end zone for a two-point conversion that trimmed the Raiders’ lead to 23-15.
“I want to say they dropped nine, had two people rushing. I knew they weren’t going to be able to tackle me,” Murray said. “It was just about, hopefully, backyard football at that point, trying to find somebody, move, get open and make a play.”
“There’s so many do-or-die plays, I lost count, where we had to have this stop, had to have this 2-point conversion, had to score, had to have the fourth down,” Kingsbury said. “And guys just kept fighting. I mean nobody blinked. At halftime it was just, ‘Hey, we got to settle in and do what we do.’
“We played about as bad as you could the first half and didn’t play great the second half, but the effort was incredible.”
