Kyler Murray posted some photos. In them, the Arizona Cardinals quarterback is wearing a Michael Vick jersey, and standing next to him is his Pit Bull.
The post was up for less than a day. It was screenshotted, reposted to X, and viewed hundreds of thousands of times before he pulled it down. The comments split roughly the way you’d expect: one camp calling the photos insensitive and vile, another insisting he was paying homage to a childhood hero and was probably too young to have connected the dots.
By Wednesday he was answering for it at a Cardinals press conference. Murray was unequivocal that he doesn’t support animal cruelty or dogfighting in any form, and explained the jersey as straightforward hero worship: Vick was a player he had looked up to enormously as a kid.
He also pointed to his own dogs — two Bully breeds, Trunk and Swoosh, regular fixtures on his social media — and said they live like royalty. He hadn’t set out to endorse anything, he said. He had seen how much the photos hurt people, taken them down, and he was sorry to anyone he’d hurt.
Fine. Apology accepted, as far as it goes. But if you think the reaction was about a quarterback’s outfit, you’ve misread what people were actually angry about.
The thing under the jersey
In 2007, Michael Vick pleaded guilty to running a dogfighting operation. More than 70 dogs, the majority of them Pit Bulls, were recovered from his property. Dogs that lost were executed by hanging, drowning, and slamming. He served 21 months in federal prison.
That case did more than end a career for a while. It is arguably the single most consequential animal cruelty prosecution in modern American history. It put dogfighting on the evening news for months. It galvanized a generation of animal welfare advocates. And it produced the Vick dogs themselves — the 51 survivors, most of whom, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the time that fighting dogs were beyond saving, were evaluated individually, rehabilitated, and placed. Several became therapy dogs. That reversal changed how shelters across the country evaluate Pit Bulls to this day.
So when a Pit Bull owner puts on that jersey and poses with his dog, the image is not neutral. It’s a specific dog breed, standing next to the name of the man who tortured that breed at scale, and the picture is being taken by someone who presumably loves his dogs.
Why the outrage overshot the man
Murray, born in 1997, was ten years old when Vick was indicted. It is entirely plausible that he grew up watching Vick highlights — and Vick was, athletically, one of the most electrifying quarterbacks who ever played — and metabolized the man as a legend before he ever processed what the man did.
That’s not a defense so much as an explanation, and it’s the explanation that should worry animal welfare people most. Because the jersey is a symptom, not the disease.
Vick has been, over eighteen years, comprehensively welcomed back. He returned to the NFL, won Comeback Player of the Year in 2010, worked with the Humane Society of the United States speaking against dogfighting, and moved into broadcasting. The rehabilitation has been so thorough that a Pit Bull owner in 2025 can put his jersey on for a photo and evidently not anticipate a problem.
That is what people were reacting to. Murray just happened to be the one holding the jersey when the accumulated frustration went off.
The uncomfortable question this leaves
There is a real argument on the other side, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than shouted down. Vick served his sentence. He has spent years doing advocacy work against the practice he was convicted of. The core premise of a justice system that isn’t purely punitive is that a person can, in fact, come back. If a man who did what he did can never be forgiven, then the concept of rehabilitation is decorative.
The counter-argument is not that Vick should be in prison forever. It’s about what “coming back” is allowed to look like. There is a difference between a man being permitted to earn a living and a man being restored to hero status — because the second one means his name goes on a jersey, and a jersey is a thing a ten-year-old wears.
Where the line sits between those two is a genuinely hard question, and reasonable people who love dogs land on opposite sides of it. Murray’s post forced the question into public view for about 36 hours. Then everyone moved on.
What’s new since this was written
The jersey moment did not happen in a vacuum, and the context makes it look less like a random misstep and more like an inevitability.
In December 2024, Norfolk State University hired Vick as head coach of its football program — the 19th in school history, on a four-year deal reportedly worth $400,000 a year, the highest for a head coach in the program’s history. The backlash was immediate. PETA president Ingrid Newkirk issued a blistering statement calling him a “charming, charismatic psychopath” based on her own interview with him while his sentencing was pending, while adding that PETA believes he won’t fight dogs again and is focused on prosecuting those who still do. A change.org petition circulated. Animal welfare groups split, again, over whether the hire represented redemption or amnesia.
His first season was rough on the field: Norfolk State finished 1-10, including a nine-game losing streak.
So by the time Murray posted those photos in September 2025, Vick was not a retired athlete fading into memory. He was an actively employed college head coach, on the sideline, in the news. The jersey wasn’t nostalgia. It was current events.
References
- U.S. Department of Justice. Michael Vick and co-defendants: federal dogfighting indictment and plea agreement (2007).
- ESPN. Former NFL great Michael Vick introduced as Norfolk State coach.
- Fox News. PETA comments on Michael Vick hiring by Norfolk State football team.
- Best Friends Animal Society. The Vicktory Dogs.
- ASPCA. Dogfighting: a closer look.
