It wasn't magic.
Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray caused a bit of a stir last month when he scrubbed his Instagram page of every Cardinals-related post. It was the beginning of weeks of drama that led to anonymous reports about Murray’s attitude, Larry Fitzgerald’s father calling Murray “spoiled,” and Murray’s agent releasing an illegible statement.
Murray wants the Cardinals to show a strong commitment to him in contract negotiations, and matters may be moving in the right direction. That’s because all those Arizona Cardinals posts were suddenly restored to Murray’s Instagram account on Tuesday.
His page was back to looking like nothing had even changed since four weeks ago.
But wait, how did Murray even do that?
All the posts maintained their original publish date, so some fans were confused about how Murray was able to scrub and restore posts in the first place.
The answer, though, is pretty simple.
Five years ago, Instagram launched an archive feature that allows users to save posts but hide them from the public view. To use that feature, you go to an individual post, hit the three-dot icon at the top-right corner and select the “archive” option. Easy.
While deleting a post is permanent and wipes all the data from that post, archive simply hides the post from public view. That allows you to restore the post whenever you want and maintain the publish date, likes and comments.
Murray’s decision to archive the posts rather than delete them showed that he expected a positive resolution to his situation with the Cardinals. If he was truly done with Arizona and wanted out, he would have hit the delete button.
Was it petty? Sure. But still, Arizona has to be happy that the Cardinals photos are back.
