Why Marvin Harrison Jr. and Malik Nabers Were the First Two Receivers Drafted

And here we are, into the (relatively) slow part of the NFL calendar …

The Cardinals bought into Marvin Harrison Jr. the person as much as they did the player. That’s one reason why, realistically, it was going to take moving heaven and earth to get Arizona GM Monti Ossenfort to move the fourth pick in the 2024 NFL draft.

It’s not just that Harrison is a great player. Everyone knows that.

It’s that he’s a prospect who checks just about every box for the Cardinals’ second-year boss.

From the start of this draft cycle, I had folks tell me that Harrison was in Ossenfort's wheelhouse the same way as Paris Johnson Jr., Harrison's teammate who was selected by the Arizona GM in the 2023 draft. Harrison was a physical prototype, he was clean character-wise, and his football IQ was off the charts. But you might’ve already heard me say all of that.

What you may not know is how the Cardinals researched the person and got the information they needed on Harrison as a player—after Harrison made the choice to turn much of his focus toward being ready for his rookie season, rather than running, jumping or lifting for teams through the pre-draft process. In the end, Arizona got everything it needed, even if it did happen in a different sort of way.

• Ossenfort did see Harrison play against Rutgers on Oct. 1, 2022, with Ohio State home to Rutgers, and Ossenfort’s Titans (he was there as director of player personnel at the time) playing the next day two-and-a-half hours away in Indianapolis. Harrison had one of his least prolific statistical days of the past two years (3 catches, 18 yards; 1 rush, 14 yards), but the GM saw his routine in warmups, and though he was more worried about draft-eligible guys at the time, he filed all that away.

• The following March, Ossenfort had a national scout and an area scout in Columbus for C.J. Stroud’s pro day. NFL folks on the ground were told to keep an eye on Harrison, because he probably wouldn’t do this again—foreshadowing how Harrison would handle the spring of 2024. So Ossenfort went back and looked at the tape, and checked with the guys who’d been on the ground, and they all saw the same thing: Harrison was a big man who moved like a smaller guy, with his ability to run the whole route tree, and he was explosive.

• The combine meeting was, more or less, a simple meet-and-greet. Ossenfort and coach Jonathan Gannon spent 18 minutes with him, and wanted to get to know him. What they learned was, first and foremost, that he wasn’t loud and boisterous, or seeking attention, like a lot of guys at his position. They also saw how detailed of a plan he had for everything football-wise, and how his handling of the pre-draft process was just an example of it. He asked the Cardinals if they needed to see anything at his pro day. They said no.

• Next up was the 30 visit. With Harrison coming from Los Angeles and his 30 visit with the Chargers, Ossenfort and assistant GM Dave Sears kicked things off with dinner at Steak 44 in Paradise Valley. They didn’t plan to talk scheme, or really football at all. Instead, they just wanted to talk life. But things did eventually turn back to the game, with Harrison taking Ossenfort and Sears through his daily life, his plan for being a pro and his (lofty) goals.

• As for the actual visit itself at the facility, that happened the next day. The Cardinals basically wanted to mimic what an in-season Wednesday would be like for Harrison, minus the on-field stuff. Over the course of a six-hour day, he met with position coaches, offensive coordinator Drew Petzing and head coach Jonathan Gannon to go through an install, then met with the sports science folks and trainers before coming back to the coaches at the end of the day to be tested on the aforementioned install. He aced the process.

And, of course, you know the rest. As Ossenfort figured, once Drake Maye came off the board at No. 3, the market for the fourth pick flattened out and the decision became academic for the Cardinals, who saw Harrison as a unique receiver prospect with his combination of length, deceptive/smooth speed, explosiveness and ball skills.

Adding the bloodlines to that, and a blinding consistency to how he handled everything—all of it coming off as a naturally humble “this is what I do” rather than “look at what I did”—and, yeah, it wasn’t too complicated for Arizona.

Even better, now, based on the fact that he trained for football and not the pre-draft obstacle course, he gets to hit the ground running in a way a lot of ways that rookies don’t.

While we’re on the receiver, it can be said now that Malik Nabers very much took his pre-draft process as a competition. And so it was interesting to hear over the past couple of days that Nabers was actually on his 30 visit to New Jersey to visit the Giants together with Harrison and Washington’s Rome Odunze (taken ninth by Chicago).

The three were very clearly jockeying for draft position, and Nabers very clearly through the process showed he was not just aware of it, but he was embracing it.

It was there at dinner the night before and through the visit, and it had become a pretty constant theme with Nabers, not just with the Giants. With another team, Nabers wouldn’t refer to Harrison or Odunze by name, and some evaluators took his decision to run a second 40 at his pro day, after clocking sub-4.4 seconds on his first one, as an implicit reference to Harrison’s decision not to do any testing ahead of the draft.

The edge, of course, was all over Nabers’s tape, too, with a violent, physical style of play evident in how he turned himself into the class’s best run-after-catch receiver.

That said, Nabers’s reputation for being high maintenance was a concern for teams, and the Giants have had some tough recent experiences with high-maintenance receivers (one reason why a lot of teams thought New York might go with Odunze). And New York did its homework and came to a comfort level pretty quickly.

Coach Brian Daboll and GM Joe Schoen went to dinner with Nabers on the 30 visit. Ahead of the LSU pro day, because Daboll and Schoen were at the owners meetings and had to fly in the morning of to see the workout, the Giants sent a couple of staffers to another dinner with him. They met at the combine, and Schoen also saw Nabers play live over Labor Day weekend against Florida State.

The other piece of the puzzle was the experience both head coach and GM have had with receivers that could be a little much—something that pretty often comes as part of the package with high-end guys at the position. The two were together with Stefon Diggs in Buffalo and Brandon Marshall in Miami, and Schoen was with Steve Smith in Carolina before that. And while there were some headaches with those guys, all three had a fierce competitiveness that, in most cases, would supersede the issues between the lines.

Nabers doesn’t turn 21 until late July, so the hope is he’ll continue to mature and grow into someone who can handle being a star in New York. And as that happens, the Giants are pretty confident the stuff you can’t teach will continue to show up.

The Patriots’ hire of Eliot Wolf as executive vice president of player personnel might’ve been a little clumsy, but they got the right guy. And we can get the “clumsy” part of the equation covered first—after having no coaching search, having written the team’s plan of succession with Jerod Mayo, New England effectively conducted a one-day GM search.

Ownership met with Eagles scouting director Brandon Hunt and ex-Carolina cap chief Samir Suleiman in Boston on Wednesday. By rule, the team had to interview two minority candidates before hiring Wolf, and that day of meetings put the Patriots in compliance and set the stage for Saturday’s announcement. That the candidates weren’t brought to team headquarters, and didn’t meet with anyone other than the Krafts, raises questions.

Now, to be sure, no one is saying the Krafts were working with any sort of prejudice here. They just hired a 36-year-old African-American head coach who came up through their system as a player, and then an assistant coach. And they did follow the letter of the rules. But as for the spirit of the rule? That’s obviously a different story.

I’d also say an organization that hasn’t conducted a coach or GM search in a quarter-century could benefit from going through the exercise legitimately, if for no other reason than you get to see the way other teams work (and succeed). But that’s probably another story for another day.

As for Wolf, there’s no question he’s deserving. He’d been a finalist in recent searches in Chicago and Minnesota, was a de facto No. 2 in Green Bay and Cleveland before arriving in New England in 2020, and quickly earned the respect of everyone with the Patriots.

The Krafts wanted to give him a trial run this offseason. He had $70 million in cap space, the third pick in the draft, and the power to change things. Wolf came in and broke down walls in what had been a very siloed-off operation, communicated a very clear process, strategy and set of expectations while keeping some elements of the old Bill Belichick way. He showed himself to be a collaborative, capable, level-headed leader who didn’t get emotional through the highs and lows of free agency and the draft..

He also brought aboard Alonzo Highsmith, whom he came up with in Green Bay and worked alongside as a top lieutenant to John Dorsey in Cleveland. As the Krafts got to know Highsmith, that became another mark in his favor.

So in the end, based on what I know and the information I’ve gathered, I think this has real potential to be a home-run hire for the Patriots. That ownership was willing to leapfrog Wolf over Matt Groh, who was Belichick’s last personnel chief, shows that this was more than just moving a couple of guys up the org chart. A lot of folks in the league think the world of Wolf and, by extension, this hire.

But that doesn’t mean the Patriots’ process was right.

The Bears are doing the right thing in naming Caleb Williams their starting quarterback now. Not all of these situations are created equal and you’d be correct to point out that I’ve advocated for teams to actually redshirt some rookie quarterbacks in the past—rather than doing so performatively until it suits the team to burn that redshirt.

In this case, the circumstances are different, as I see it, three reasons …

1) Williams’s creativity as a football player will give him the escape hatch to make himself right even when he’s wrong. In other words, on snaps where maybe he doesn’t see things fast enough or the picture is jumbled on him, he can create scramble situations that will allow him to shorten the learning curve. It’s something we all saw plenty of from Josh Allen as a rookie.

2) The Bears aren’t a startup. Head coach Matt Eberflus and GM Ryan Poles are in Year 3. They have Braxton Jones and Darnell Wright at tackle, DJ Moore, Keenan Allen and Odunze at receiver, Cole Kmet and Gerald Everett at tight end, and D’Andre Swift, Khalil Herbert and Roschon Johnson at running back. The defense made leaps at the end of the year. All of which puts the coaches in position to manage Williams as a rookie.

3) Williams has shown he can deal with football adversity. In fact, as we detailed last week, it’s one of the things the Bears really liked about his college experience. Last year, just about everything around him at USC came undone. The line was a mess, the receivers inexperienced, the run game spotty and the defense a disaster—and he weathered the storm. It’s not the same, of course, as adjusting to the NFL. But it should help.

And all of the above is why Chicago subtly cheated the process a bit in getting Williams ahead as it was assessing him as a prospect. Leading up to the draft and into the 30 visit, the Bears gave the 2022 Heisman winner the offensive terminology, the quarterbacking footwork and a little of the dropback game. The Bears’ offensive coaches also worked some with USC’s coaches from last year to find elements that crossed over.

Of course, there will be adjustments for the quarterback. The biggest one will be from an operational standpoint, in that he won’t be getting signals from the sideline anymore or using a clap cadence. Another will be learning to play more from under center.

But, for the most part, the Bears feel like they’re set up to give Williams a great chance to excel right away. Which is why there was no sense in waiting to throw him out there.

Since we’re on the rookie quarterbacks, it’s at least worth mentioning that the Broncos and Falcons took the guys they did in the first round knowing a big benefit of drafting a quarterback that high would be negated. How so? Well, in each case, there’ll be a narrow window during which they’ll be able to actually take advantage of having a Michael Penix Jr. or a Bo Nix on a rookie deal.

• In the case of Denver, the Broncos are taking on $53 million in dead cap this year and $32 million next year, meaning they’ll be in the third year of Nix’s career when they’ll be able to make the most of having a smaller quarterback number on their cap. After that season, they’ll have to make a decision on Nix’s fifth-year option, and he’ll be eligible for an extension. So their opportunity to build aggressively will be there for just a year or two.

• Atlanta’s window is even smaller. Kirk Cousins is locked in at $90 million over the next two years. He’s has $10 million fully guaranteed for 2026, and the offsets could allow for the team to walk away then. But even in that case, after $25 million and $40 million cap charges this year and next, there’d still be another $25 million in cap to account for in ’26, meaning the Falcons would get the benefit of Penix’s rookie deal until his fourth season, at the point where a decision is made on his option and he’d be eligible for an extension.

So functionally what does this mean? More or less that the usual rookie quarterback benefit is smaller to the point where, if you’re Denver or Atlanta, you’re counting on these guys being good enough to land second contracts. Usually, if you take a quarterback as high as eighth or 12th in the draft, you’d be banking on that anyway. But in these cases, the teams taking these guys are really counting on it.

And, as such, must very much believe in them.

The schedule release is coming this week, and it’s given the rest of us another front-row seat to see what the league itself is all about. No, not football. Money.

The schedule was set to be released last week, but the NFL’s process of pulling back two games from the Sunday of Week 17 and putting them on Christmas Day, a Wednesday this year, pushed things back to this coming Wednesday. The league pledged previously to only play games on Christmas on days that it traditionally plays—in other words, within the Thursday-to-Monday window—but strong ratings and the revenue they can create scuttled that plan, and so here we are with the league’s true intentions laid bare.

We’ve been through this before, but it would be great to just get some honesty on this topic. It’s actually really simple. Roger Goodell was promoted from COO to commissioner in 2006 largely on his ability to creatively generate new profit streams for the league, with a new order of business-minded owners leading that charge. His mandate has been to get the league to $25 billion in annual revenue. He’s inching closer and closer, and that’s been done by pulling out every couch cushion looking for every spare quarter.

This, then, is another example of the league adding inventory (as they did with Thursday Night Football, the International Series, etc.) in that effort.

There’s no shame in it.

But if they’re going to put the burden on players to pull the agreed-upon (by owners, not players) Sunday-Saturday-Wednesday turn, and make team employees top-to-bottom work on this particular major holiday, even when putting games on that holiday means shoehorning it into the calendar, then let’s call this what this is and be honest about the goal here: It’s about money. Which, again, is why the schedule release is this week rather than last week.

Commanders rookie DT Jer’Zhan “Johnny” Newton is a good example of what I like about the team’s draft class. We knew Newton had the foot fracture coming out of his final season at Illinois. Now we know he has the same injury, a Jones fracture, in his other foot. And whether teams knew about it or not, Newton’s physical status certainly knocked the disruptive interior pass rusher down a bit on draft weekend.

As I see it, Washington leveraged its situation to scoop him up with the 36th pick.

Because GM Adam Peters and head coach Dan Quinn are on the front end of a rebuild, with No. 2 pick Jayden Daniels as their centerpiece, they weren’t pressed to make picks based on what they’re going to get out of a guy right now. Now, it’s not like they took a bunch of risks. But they fit this one in on a guy who had mid-first-round talent with a bunch of others such as Mike Sainristil and Ben Sinnott, who are really good football players.

The Commanders are also confident they’re all the right kinds of guys. That should help in developing all of them and, in particular, with a guy coming off a couple of pretty significant injuries.

There’s something in particular that—looking at it now, with the top-end part of the team-building process essentially complete—I really like about the Texans’ offseason. Long-time readers may know about the Alvin Harper Theory I lean on when it comes to acquiring veteran players. The idea, which I’ve gotten from a couple teams, is that you want to be careful bringing in guys who weren’t the primary guys at their positions with other teams while projecting them into those sorts of roles going forward.

Harper, for the uninitiated, was the No. 2 receiver for the great Cowboys’ championship teams of 1992 and ’93 behind Michael Irvin. The Buccaneers signed him to a big (for then) contract to be their Irvin, and without Irvin to draw coverage away from him, Harper quickly flamed out and provided a cautionary tale for teams moving forward.

So what I like about what the Texans have done is they’ve essentially done the opposite of this. Danielle Hunter was the Vikings’ top pass rusher for nearly a decade, and a focus for every offensive coordinator charged with protecting a quarterback against Minnesota. Likewise, Stefon Diggs was that guy for both the Vikings and Bills, constantly facing defenses geared up to stop him. And Joe Mixon had been the focal point of the Bengals’ run game pretty much since the day they drafted him back in 2017.

That, of course, doesn’t guarantee success. But it does mean you’re not guessing on how they’d handle being the guy. Taking even more of the guesswork out of it is that all three guys are on their third contract as a pro, so their track records are well-established.

Now, there is a flipside to all this, and that’s the risk that Father Time quickly catches up with one, two or all of them at once. But even with that possibility, these were smart moves for GM Nick Caserio and head coach DeMeco Ryans—and a good use, too, of the flexibility Stroud gives the team in having him on a rookie deal over the next three years.

The list of remaining free agents for this time of year is unusually strong. And rather than try and wax poetic on all of that, I’ll just give you guys a sampling of what’s available right now, on May 13 …

• QB Ryan Tannehill
• RB Dalvin Cook
• RB Cam Akers
• WR Michael Thomas
• WR Hunter Renfrow
• WR Mecole Hardman
• TE Logan Thomas
• OT Donovan Smith
• OT David Bakhtiari
• OT D.J. Humphries
• OG Dalton Risner
• C Connor Williams
• DE Emmanuel Ogbah
• DE Yannick Ngakoue
• DE Carl Lawson
• DT Calais Campbell
• DT Lawrence Guy
• DT Linval Joseph
• LB Zach Cunningham
• LB Kwon Alexander
• CB Xavien Howard
• CB Stephon Gilmore
• CB Patrick Peterson
• S Justin Simmons
• S Marcus Maye
• S Quandre Diggs
• S Jamal Adams
• S Micah Hyde

Now, admittedly, some of these guys are more names than they are the players they used to be. Still, though, the sheer volume of notable vets seems sky high relative to where it normally is. And in the case of a lot of these guys, you have to think this is simply a matter of the market not being there for them, and their decisions to wait out teams who may develop a need or suffer an untimely injury.

Either way, it does feel like there’s still a bunch of help out there for teams.

I’ll close this week out by sending my best to the family of ex-Chargers GM A.J. Smith on his passing Sunday after a seven-year battle with prostate cancer. To start, I thought it was fitting that A.J.’s only son, Falcons assistant GM Kyle Smith, revealed the news. To me, there’s no greater expression of love from a child to a parent than following in his or her footsteps, and Kyle’s certainly made a name for himself doing that.

And while Smith had a bit of a gruff personality and could be a little edgy, I personally will always appreciate him. When I was in my late 20s covering the league at large for the first time, Smith was always welcoming to me, and he and I found a good connection in our shared New England roots. He probably had no real reason to help me out but did anyway, and I learned a ton about football and the league talking with him during those years.

He also built one of the most talented teams I’ve ever seen—the 2006 Chargers. That team was upset by the Patriots in the divisional round in a very weird game (see: McCree, Marlon). But that San Diego team was good enough to beat that New England team by 20, and my guess is that if they had, they would’ve won the whole thing that year.

Alas, it didn’t happen, and though those loaded rosters did win five AFC West titles in six years (a franchise first), they never quite got over the top.

Still, Smith’s resume was on those fields, with those great groups of players he helped put together after taking over for the late John Butler—the two of them came to the Chargers together after working in tandem in Buffalo, first under Bill Polian, and then with Butler—and that resume was a really good one.

Anyway, to pay tribute to the work he did, I reached out to Chargers president of football operations John Spanos, the son of owner Dean Spanos who worked on the football side with Smith for 10 years.

“I’ll forever be grateful to A.J., not only for what he did for the Chargers but also for how much he helped me personally,” Spanos said, via text. “The year I left the Management Council at the league office to rejoin the Chargers coincided with A.J.’s first year as GM. Looking back now, I can’t believe how fortunate the timing was. A.J. was an unbelievable mentor, affording me the opportunity to spend time with him watching tape, explaining different intricacies of how he went about evaluating players and pointing them out on film.

“His track record as an evaluator and team builder speaks for itself, and I’ll never forget his willingness to share his process with me. Starting in his second season as GM, we began a string of five division championships in the six years. Those were his teams. It hit me hard when I heard this tragic news because it seemingly came out of nowhere, with so few people knowing the health battle he had been facing. But that was A.J., he always did things on his terms because he believed in his process.

“He was also such a strong family man, and my thoughts go out to his wife Sue as well as his children Andrea and Kyle.”