Exploring the mystery of Marvin Harrison Jr.'s meager offensive output in Week 1

Marvin Harrison Jr. did not talk in the Arizona Cardinals dressing room when media arrived after the Buffalo Bills’ 34-28 victory on Sunday at Highmark Stadium. There were no insights from the source on his one-catch, three-target, four-yard NFL debut.

Quarterback Kyler Murray insisted there was no concerted effort to exclude Harrison from the offense.

Coach Jonathan Gannon said it was simply a product of what the Buffalo defense was doing, and what was available to Murray within the flow and philosophy of the offense.

“When I looked, I saw a lot of cloud to him, so they obviously were trying to take him away,” Gannon said of the added coverage the Bills were shading Harrison’s way. “But I think we had a bunch of guys catch balls. That’s how our offense is going to be built, guys. The ball should go where it should go, depending on the coverage, but we’ll get him involved.”

Neither of those explanations could satisfy the angry masses after Harrison’s meager offensive output in Orchard Park. Cardinals fans wanted somebody to blame; somebody to burn.

Offensive coordinator Drew Petzing was under fire in the always entertaining Twitterverse. Murray was under fire for everything from his height to his supposed failure to see a wide-open Harrison on what some felt would have been a touchdown — an analysis that former NFL quarterback Dan Orlovsky dismantled with a detailed explanation of what was actually happening on the play.

I hate freeze frames pic.twitter.com/yqU1DCduow

— Dan Orlovsky (@danorlovsky7) September 9, 2024

Here’s something we can probably all agree on. The Cardinals need to get Harrison the ball more. You don’t draft a guy No. 4 overall and then throw up your hands if the defense is denying him that ball.

You have to put the ball in the hands of your playmakers.

“Certainly as a play-caller, you feel that throughout the game,” Petzing said when he addressed media on Tuesday at the Cardinals training facility in Tempe. “I was a little bit surprised with how much respect they gave him early in the game, and I think it opened up some things, especially in the red zone in the run game.

“But he’s one of our top players; certainly he’s on the forefront of our mind in terms of getting him the ball. I think they did some good things to take him away, and certainly I could have called some plays differently to try to get him a little bit more involved early.”

Murray didn’t fully attribute Harrison’s quiet day to the Bills defense. His job, he reminded everyone, is to run the offense that Petzing has built for him.

“As a quarterback, obviously, you’re going through your reads,” he said. “Sometimes the ball goes to him, but that’s not my job. I have a sense and a feel for guys when they don’t get the ball and when they are getting the ball, but I leave that up to Drew. He tells me, ‘Don’t worry about that type of stuff. Just keep playing your game and get the ball to where the ball is supposed to go.'”

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What nobody really touched on at length was the role Harrison may or may not have played in earning so few targets in a game where he had man-coverage on 11 routes; more attention on the rest.

“I think he got some things out of the way,” Petzing said vaguely. “Certainly, there were some nerves there, plus a new opponent, a new coverage. You’ll certainly want him to have more production, and a lot of that’s going to come from me, and not him.”

There was also a drop, and a play where Harrison clearly did not read the defense the way he should have, resulting in an awkward incompletion well behind him along the sideline. You can watch those in this video below with the highly biased headline.

“That’s our first time playing together, but I was trying to back shoulder him because the route we were trying to run wasn’t going to be completed downfield,” Murray said. “Safety’s over the top so the back shoulder was there. I think again, that’s just something that we’ll click on; we’ll get better at.”

You have to wonder if Harrison was partially to blame for his quiet day. You have to wonder whether the decision to sit Murray and Harrison for the entire preseason contributed to a lack of chemistry. You have to wonder if Harrison needed those reps to better acclimate to the NFL.

But you still have to wonder if Petzing should have dialed up Harrison’s number early to get him involved and in the flow, and then more in the second half when the Bills stacked the box and took away the short game that the Cardinals had employed so successfully in building a 17-3 lead.

And then you have to wonder if anybody would have cared had Greg Dortch drawn a flag on the final drive and the Cardinals had scored a go-ahead touchdown. You have to wonder if this entire narrative will vanish on Sunday if Harrison surfaces when the Cardinals host the Rams.

The NFL is built for armchair analysis when it’s hard to parse fact from fiction. The team isn’t opening its playbook to media and fans so they don’t know the play by play responsibilities of the players. They don’t always know who made the right or wrong choices; the good plays or the mistakes.

Speaking of that, I did ask Petzing what goes through his mind when he hears media evaluating players or analyzing plays without the benefit of some key information.

“Certainly, there are times where I laugh and say, like, ‘Okay, if you were in the building and watching tape with this, you’d feel very differently,'” he said. “We’re not going to give you that luxury at all times. But there are other times where it’s like, ‘Hey, I thought the same exact thing that guy said.'”

I suspect Petzing was being generous, but the Cardinals weren’t offering any further explanation; just a promise to involve Harrison more.

“Generally, that’s the plan,” Petzing said. “I think at the end of the day, the only thing we are worried about is winning the game. And at the end of the day, if we’re doing that, great. If we’re not, we didn’t get the job done. 

“I think that’s always going to be the mindset, and then we’re going to go back and look at the tape and say, ‘Hey, did we get our best players the opportunities that we could have based on what they were doing?’ Is there more we could have done? Here’s how we need to move forward to do that. Or hey, that’s kind of what the game dictated. The next game is going to be something different. Let’s make sure we’re ready.'”

Top photo of Marvin Harrison Jr. via Getty Images

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