The Arizona Cardinals invested heavily in Marvin Harrison Jr. when they selected the Ohio State wide receiver with the No. 4 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. Just four games into his third season, the Cardinals have already given up on that investment, essentially admitting their draft mistake in the process.
Saturday, ESPN's Adam Schefter reported that the Cardinals are "finalizing a deal to trade Harrison," though it still remains to be seen what his new landing spot is.
Regardless of where Harrison gets traded to or what Arizona receives in exchange, it's impossible to view this as anything other than a draft failure by the Cardinals. They certainly won't receive anything close to as valuable as a top five draft pick; I'll tell you that much.
Marvin Harrison Jr. is officially a draft bust for the Cardinals
The silver lining is that it ultimately was in both Harrison and the Cardinals' best interest to move on from this failed pairing.
Harrison hasn't met lofty draft expectations by any means, but he has showcased flashes of upside through 33 games played total. It seemed to be as much of a mental hurdle as anything with Harrison, meaning he should benefit from a change of scenery to at least see if he can get his career on more of an upward trajectory elsewhere.
From the Cardinals' standpoint, this was a difficult but necessary pill to swallow.
No team wants to admit their top five pick was a bust, but the alternative of continuing to pretend like everything was fine would've taken an even bigger toll on this team going forward. Missing on this Harrison pick was a huge setback in the Cardinals rebuild, but at least now they can move on to the next chapter.
Cardinals can finally move on from their draft mistake
It's easier to recover from that pick when you still have plenty of offensive weapons, specifically tight end Trey McBride and rookie running back Jeremiyah Love.
Even in his relatively limited role thus far, we've already seen Love produce enough to justify a top five draft selection. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Harrison's time in The Valley, which has now come to an end.
For Harrison, hopefully it's a landing spot that can find a better way to utilize the talent and skill set the Cardinals initially saw when they drafted him so high. However, it's fair to wonder how much of this failed partnership was due to the Cardinals' inability to utilize him and how much was simply Harrison not turning out to be the NFL prospect he was projected to be coming out of Ohio State.
Either way, it's in both parties' best interest to move on, as this clearly wasn't working. Harrison was trending downwards after becoming an afterthought for Jacoby Brissett and Mike LaFleur's offense.
But hey, at least the Cardinals didn't continue to dig themselves a deeper hole. By trading Harrison, they were able to admit their draft mistake, putting this rebuild in a better position to recover and move on entirely.
Add us as a preferred source on Google