It’s a good thing the Arizona Cardinals are 1-1 early in the season and got that huge win over the Chargers, otherwise there would probably be an even bigger microscope on starting wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. right now.
Over the team’s first two games, Harrison has just one catch for 33 yards on four targets. This is his third NFL season and he’s averaging less than 50 yards per game over his career.
But in a recent interview with ESPN, Harrison made it clear that he’s content with his preparation process and doesn’t intend to change it.
“Does your confidence come from results or does your confidence come from your process?” Harrison said, via ESPN. “And I think for me it comes from my process. So, my process isn’t going to change whether I get zero catches or 10 catches. I’m going to still do the same thing week in and week out, Monday through Saturday to prepare myself for games. So, I think that’s where I have a lot of my confidence comes from. And obviously you want to have more of an impact in the game, but I think confidence really has to come from preparation more than anything.”
Harrison also defended his lack of production, attributing it to “a combination of a lot of things,” from route trees to protection to coverage to QB play.
“It’s definitely a combination of a lot of things,” Harrison said. “For my route tree getting down the field, you need a lot of things to go right. You need the right coverage, you need protection to hold up, you need me to run a great route, you need obviously Jacoby to make the right pass and make the right read. So, I feel like it’s never one person’s fault for anybody’s success or lack thereof, really. So, I think it’s always a combination of a bunch of things and whether that’s a lack of success or success in general.”
Harrison feels that his lack of production through the first two games has more to do with the defenses they’ve played against being very good than Arizona’s offense being bad.
“Pretty much that simple,” Harrison said. “Seattle’s a really good defense and you don’t want to give a lot of teams, especially a rival team, a lot of credit. But when you just look across the league, they’re far beyond above everybody else, especially on the defensive side of the football. So, things like that happen.”
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The Problem…
There’s one big issue with Harrison’s assessment of his performance though: All of those things that he’s cited as problems are the exact reason the Cardinals drafted him in the first place. When the team took him No. 4 overall in the 2024 NFL Draft, they did so in the hopes that his talent would allow him to overcome things like tough defenses and tight coverage.
The Cardinals can only hope that Harrison is just a late bloomer. They’ve invested too much into him for this level of production through three seasons.
