A former quarterback at Texas A&M and a draft pick of the Milwaukee Brewers, Kevin Murray is now a private quarterback tutor in North Texas. Under him, Murray learned routes and defenses and proper mechanics. Kevin Murray inculcated such sound fundamentals that college coaches, when reviewing film of Murray shot from behind, marveled how he used his hips and torso to throw.
“They told me that if they didn’t think it would offend the quarterbacks in their room,” Jeff Fleener, Murray’s offensive coordinator at Allen, said in an interview last year, “they would show them high school footage of what the lower half of Kyler’s body looked like.”
From early on, he wasn’t like the other kids. While other youth football teams focused on rushing, Murray’s offense split four receivers wide. He was 9. In middle school, he would gather teammates at his home for extra practice, then call plays during games that he devised. At 15, with his heels planted on the 45-yard line, he would, by rotating his upper body and flicking his wrist, loft spirals flat-footed into a 50-gallon trash can situated in the back corner of the end zone.
“His go-to line was always, ‘It’s easy,’ but he never bragged or showboated about any of it,” Kendall Clinton, an Allen teammate, said. “It’s like he was born to do what he does. I used to look at him like, you know, maybe I should be more like him.”
That line — “It’s easy” — has been Murray’s Twitter bio for years, co-opted from the basketball player Quincy Miller, whose BallIsLife videos he devoured on YouTube. To Murray, sports are to be conquered, not played. He did not just learn chess as a boy, he won elementary-school championships. When his longtime trainer, Stephen Baca, beat him in the board game Sequence, Murray took the game home to improve. After the Oakland Athletics drafted Murray with the ninth pick in 2018, they invited him, as part of introductory festivities, to take batting practice. To prepare, he hit for three hours on three consecutive days.