There is always plenty of mystery at the tight end position but as I built out my way-too-early 2024 projections at tight end, there appears to be one player that it is very important to get right. His name is Trey McBride.
McBride was TE3 per-game in the second half of 2023, averaging 14.8 PPR Fantasy points per game. A large part of that is the fact that Drew Petzig, in his first season as the Arizona Cardinals' offensive coordinator, ran the most tight end-centric offense in the league. Cardinals quarterbacks threw 32% of their passes to tight ends in 2023, and McBride saw a 27% target share after Zach Ertz went down.
For what it's worth, this wasn't the first time that McBride put up gaudy counting stats. He had 90 catches for 1,121 yards in his final season (12 games) at Colorado State. Those are insane numbers for a college tight end and a large part of the reason the Cardinals spent a Round 2 pick on him in the 2022 NFL Draft. This is a dude who has the pedigree and just gave us a half season of elite production with some pretty raunchy quarterback play. It's no wonder he projects out as TE2 in my early projections, even with a 10% regression of last year's target numbers.
The monster hiding under the bed is Marvin Harrison, Jr. He may cause McBride to see his target share to fall by a lot more than 10%. Harrison is a fantastic prospect at wide receiver and many have him being selected by the Cardinals at No. 3 overall. If that happens, it will be gut check time for McBride truthers. My early lean is that tight end bucket will remain very large in Petzig's offense and McBride and Harrison can dominate targets like Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce used to. If anything, I may be hoping for Harrison to control McBride's ADP.
Here are my way-too-early tight end projections:
