“The problem is, in football, you see the consequence of his great athletic skill applied to a sport,” Scott Boras, the baseball superagent who represents Murray, said in an interview this week. “For those of us who know baseball, the real sport where he’ll be a star lies ahead.”
Most athletes with Murray’s incredible athleticism are guided away from baseball at a younger age, Boras said. Baseball stardom is notoriously difficult to project. However, Boras said, for a person to combine Murray’s running and leaping ability with his bat speed is “extraordinarily rare.”
Murray would have plenty of gridiron options. This season, his first as a starter, he has thrown for 37 touchdowns and rushed for 11 more. He and Tua Tagovailoa, Alabama’s sophomore quarterback, look like they will be the closest Heisman contenders in years.
“He would be a first-round pick if he committed and promised he was going to play football,” the ESPN analyst Todd McShay said. Though Murray is short, listed at 5 feet 10 inches, the league’s attitude toward the prototypical quarterback is rapidly changing, McShay added. Murray, he said, with his speed and powerful arm, resembles successful quarterbacks like Wilson and Michael Vick.
Yet despite Murray’s pledge to go all-in on baseball now, it was clear that it was important to him to have this football season. At an introductory news conference with the A’s last June, Murray was asked whether he would have signed a contract with the team had it not let him return to play football. When the quiet Murray struggled to answer, Billy Beane, the team’s executive vice president, joked, “I’ll make it easy: It was a deal-breaker for us if he didn’t go back and play at the University of Oklahoma.”
The contract he signed with the A’s, for more than $4 million, may well have made Murray the highest-paid college athlete ever, even if — in an exception expressly permitted by N.C.A.A. bylaws — he was not paid for the sport in which he competed.
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source https://newsa.co.network/oklahoma-quarterback-kyler-murray-nears-the-end-of-a-two-sport-career/
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