“I’m not going to sit here and act like I don’t see nothing.” That was Marvin Harrison Jr.’s honest answer this week when asked about the criticism piling up online after a slow start for the Cardinals, and he gets his next chance to change the conversation Sunday against the 49ers.
The 2024 No. 4 overall pick has one catch for 33 yards on four targets through two games, despite playing 77 percent of the snaps. “I understand who I am and what I was expected to do when I got drafted here and all the expectations put on me,” Harrison told the team’s website. “You get told to block out the noise and not pay attention to it.”
Cardinals locker room rallies around Harrison
Quarterback Jacoby Brissett made a point of backing his top receiver. “Nobody has lost confidence in Marv. The hard part as a young player is the noise from the outside telling you what they expect from you,” Brissett said. He also admitted the frustration runs both ways: “I don’t want you to go out in the game with zero catches.” Michael Wilson took it a step further. “I can’t imagine every time you open up social media and it’s negative talk. There is no one who is a bigger Marvin fan than myself,” he said.
Coach Mike LaFleur isn’t pretending the chatter doesn’t exist, either. “I’m not going to sit here and act like I don’t know the narrative going on. In between those walls, Marv is Marv,” he said. Harrison has run 17 go routes, tied for sixth most in the NFL, so the looks are there. The ball just hasn’t followed, and he drew only one target in Week 2.
San Francisco offers a blueprint. The last time these teams met, Wilson broke out with 15 catches for 185 yards, according to ESPN’s Josh Weinfuss. Arizona could use a repeat. The Cardinals are 8.5-point underdogs and have dropped 15 straight games against teams that enter with a winning record, according to ESPN Research.
One big afternoon in Santa Clara won’t erase two quiet weeks, but it would give Harrison something better to point to than a stat line. For now, the fourth overall pick is leaning on process over production and hoping the noise fades on its own.
