Cardinals wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. carried a lot of fanfare into his first regular season game, but his debut was a dud.
The fourth overall pick caught one pass for four yards in a 34-28 loss to the Bills and said Wednesday that the performance “definitely wasn’t what I expected, what I wanted to happen” in his first time out. Some of the post-game discussion focused on whether quarterback Kyler Murray should be doing more to get him the ball, but offensive coordinator Drew Petzing said that isn’t Murray’s job and Harrison said it’s on him to make sure he’s in position to make plays.
“That’s why it kind of brought me here is to help the team, help the offense go,” Harrison said, via Josh Weinfuss of ESPN.com. “So, I have to do a better job of that going forward. I got to get open and catch the ball. That’s my job as a receiver. That is your job description. That’s what I got to do a better job.”
Murray said it is “not a secret” that they want to get the ball to Harrison more, but agreed with Petzing that it isn’t up to him to force feed the ball to the rookie. He said he thought the Buffalo defense did a good job in taking Harrison out of the game and that he has “utmost confidence” that the connection will be better down the line.
Seth Walder of ESPN pointed out that Harrison’s top speed of 16.7 mph ranks 1,699th of 1,730 wideouts who played at least 25 snaps since the start of the 2023 season. Harrison said he was “thinking a lot out there” and thinks more reps will enable him to be “thinking less and just going out there and playing.” It’s not hard to see a correlation between those things and the Cardinals will be hoping that things speed up across the board for their prized rookie.