Arizona's 2025 offense was not built around Kyler Murray, and it was not built around the fourth overall pick of the 2024 draft. It was built around a tight end. Trey McBride finished the season with 170 targets — the most on the team by a wide margin — while Marvin Harrison Jr., the player who was supposed to be the offense's WR1, drew just 74. That's a notable gap on its own. It's also, as the numbers below show, not the full story: Arizona's actual leader among wide receivers in targets wasn't Harrison Jr. at all. It's the offense, funneled hard through one tight end, that's the real headline — and Harrison's target total is a separate, smaller story about where the fourth pick landed inside it.

Table of Contents

• The 170-target season, in one line
• Same target when Murray plays, same target when Brissett plays
• What a "TE-as-alpha" offense actually looks like
• Where the fourth overall pick ranks

The 170-target season, in one line

McBride's 2025 line, on 170 targets: 126 catches, 1,239 yards, 11 red-zone touchdowns, +72.7 EPA, 6.66 average air yards. That air-yards number is the whole story of the role. It's not a Travis Kelce seam-buster job or a Darren Waller vertical-slot job — it's a short-area, catch-and-move volume role, extended to every situation on the field.

The depth split makes it explicit. Of McBride's 170 targets, 97 came at five air yards or less, and he caught 85 of them for 617 yards. Only 42 traveled 11-plus yards in the air.

The down usage is unusually heavy on early downs in raw terms:

McBride drew more raw targets on first down (72) than on any other down — well clear of his 60 second-down looks and his 31 third-down looks — which is what tells you this isn't a "third-down safety valve" or pure "red-zone specialist" archetype. He's the guy on 1st-and-10. He's also the guy in the red zone: 34 red-zone targets and 11 red-zone touchdowns, both team-highs by a wide margin.

Same target when Murray plays, same target when Brissett plays

Kyler Murray played five games in 2025 before ceding the job to Jacoby Brissett for the rest of the season. If the McBride role were chemistry-driven, you'd expect the target profile to shift with the passer. It didn't move much:

Different quarterbacks, similar average depth of target, same player getting fed at a heavy rate. Brissett's EPA-per-target to McBride (+0.458) is excellent, but Murray was also generating +0.337 EPA per target on him in a much smaller sample. That consistency across a full-season QB change is a scheme signature, not a passer preference.

What a "TE-as-alpha" offense actually looks like

To put McBride's workload in context, here's how his 2025 season compares to the handful of the highest-volume tight end seasons of the last decade and a half:

Among this group, McBride's 170 targets trail only Kelce's two 180-plus seasons and Ertz's 171-target 2018 — good reason to think of this as one of the handful of heaviest tight-end workloads of the last fifteen years, even without claiming it's an exhaustive, all-time ranking. And his role skews shorter than almost all of these: only Bowers' 2024 season ran a lower average depth of target. His red-zone workload (34 targets, 11 TDs) sits closer to peak Kelce than to Ertz's 2018, which posted more raw volume but only seven red-zone scores.

Where the fourth overall pick ranks

Here's the twist the raw 170-vs-74 comparison hides: Marvin Harrison Jr. wasn't even Arizona's most-targeted wide receiver in 2025. That title belongs to Michael Wilson, who drew 127 targets — 78 catches, 1,006 yards, a 11.92 average depth of target, and +25.8 EPA. Harrison Jr., picked fourth overall in 2024, finished third on his own team in targets: 74, on 41 catches for 608 yards and +31.1 EPA, at a deeper average depth of target (12.96) than Wilson.

That reframes the story. Arizona's offense wasn't unusually stingy toward wide receivers as a group — Wilson's 127 targets are a normal complementary-receiver workload behind a heavy tight-end usage rate. What's unusual is that the highest draft pick on the roster ranked behind both the tight end and a lower-profile wideout in raw volume.

Measuring tight-end concentration against a team's actual top-targeted wide receiver (not just its most drafted one) puts Arizona's ratio in ordinary territory compared to other TE-heavy offenses:

By that measure, Arizona's 1.34 TE-to-top-WR ratio sits in the middle of the pack — closer to Baltimore's 2021 Andrews/Brown split than to San Francisco's most lopsided 2018 season. If you instead compare McBride specifically to Harrison Jr. (170 to 74), the ratio balloons to 2.30 — but that's a story about Harrison specifically being passed over in Arizona's pecking order, not evidence that the whole receiver room was starved. The offense funneled a heavy, sustained rate of targets through McBride; separately, and for reasons the target data alone can't fully explain, the highest-drafted receiver on the roster settled in as the third read.

McBride is the story of Arizona's 2025 passing game — a short-area, every-down, red-zone tight end usage rate that ranks among the heaviest of the last fifteen years. Harrison Jr.'s 74 targets are a real and separate data point worth watching into 2026, but they describe his individual target rank on the depth chart, not a receiver corps drought.