The Eagles traded Murray (and his contract) to the Titans. He ended up being paid $22 million, a tad over the guaranteed number. So he did get it.
The Cowboys certainly did run Murray into the ground in 2014, and consciously so. Sturm again: "Murray’s 449 touches in the regular season were the second-most over the last 15 seasons in the NFL. (Only Larry Johnson’s, 2006 season, in which he was clearly run into the ground, featured more.) If you add in the two playoff games that took him to 497 touches, you would find that no player in the history of the sport had ever carried and caught the ball more in one campaign than Murray did in 2014. It wasn’t a heavy workload. It was the heaviest ever."
I don't know what you're saying about Bell at this point. When he held out, he wasn't breaking a contract; he didn't have one. He turned a contract down, but surely you're not saying that there's anything wrong with that from a professionalism standpoint. It's just not relevant to the conversation we've been having about holding out when under contract.