Why the Cardinals, Marvin Harrison Jr. could be a perfect match

TEMPE, Ariz. — A few weeks after he was drafted sixth overall by the Arizona Cardinals in 2023, offensive lineman Paris Johnson Jr. returned to his alma mater, Ohio State, where he ran into good friend and former teammate, Marvin Harrison Jr.

During the course of the conversation, Johnson told Harrison that the Cardinals were going to need someone like him: An elite playmaker who can instantly help an offense.

“We’ve been talking about it since then,” Johnson told ESPN. “He definitely said he would love to be a Cardinal.”

It may just happen after Harrison, the son of former Indianapolis Colts Hall of Fame receiver Marvin Harrison, tallied 144 receptions for 2,474 yards and 28 receiving touchdowns between the 2022 and 2023 seasons. The consensus among ESPN draft analysts is the Cardinals will take the 6-fooot-4, 205 pound wide receiver at No. 4 on Thursday when the draft kicks off (8 p.m. ET, ESPN, ABC, ESPN+ and the ESPN App). If selected by Arizona, Harrison’s lineage could help him become the answer to the void left by future Hall of Famer Larry Fitzgerald.

Arizona doesn’t have a true WR1 after it let Marquise Brown leave in free agency. Harrison would be the third receiver the Cardinals have taken in the first round in the last 20 years. He would join Fitzgerald, who went third overall in 2004, and Michael Floyd, who went 13th in 2012. Arizona has drafted 19 receivers since 2004, and only one of them — Michael Wilson — is on the roster. Since 2020, Arizona has drafted two receivers, tied for fewest in the league, according to ESPN Stats & Information.

Fitzgerald walked away at the end of the 2020 season, but Arizona has yet to find its next great receiver through the draft.

The closest Arizona came to finding a replacement for Fitzgerald — the Cardinals’ franchise leader in catches, yards, touchdowns and targets — was DeAndre Hopkins, who they traded for in 2020. His 1,407 yards in 2020 mark the only time a Cardinals receiver has gone over 1,000 yards since Fitzgerald did in 2017.

Like Fitzgerald, Harrison was a Heisman Trophy finalist, Biletnikoff winner and a unanimous All-American. Harrison’s 155 receptions and 2,613 yards each ranked sixth in Ohio State history, and his 31 touchdowns were third most.

And like Fitzgerald, Harrison could be a top-five pick.

Cardinals coach Jonathan Gannon described Harrison simply: “Playmaker.”

“Anytime he touches it he can score points,” Gannon said. “That’s the name of the game — score one more point than the other team.”

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HARRISON WAS 6 when his father retired with 1,102 receptions for 14,580 yards and 128 touchdowns. He was five days away from turning 14 when his father was enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

Being around the senior Harrison on the field and in Canton, Ohio, were experiences not even the “superhumans” in this draft class have had, said Ryne Morrison, the pass game coordinator and wide receivers coach at Harrison’s high school, St. Joseph’s Prep in Philadelphia.

“He draws on that probably without even realizing it,” Morrison said.

Morrison, who still texts with Harrison, believes there’s a voice inside the prospect’s head that reminds him he’s ultimately chasing his own legacy.

“I’ve heard him say, ‘I’m not chasing my dad,'” Morrison recalled. “‘I’m chasing myself. I want to chase my own ceiling. I don’t know how great I can be, but I’m gonna get as close as I can. I’m not trying to be better than my dad as I go into this practice today. I’m trying to be better than Marvin Jr. was yesterday.'”

He operates, if not in silence, then close to it, according to Johnson.

It wasn’t rare for Harrison to be running routes when Johnson arrived at the Buckeyes football facility at 6 a.m. to eat breakfast. And it wasn’t rare for Harrison to be catching passes from quarterbacks at 6 p.m. after practice when his teammates were already back in their rooms.

“I’ve watched him change the leadership of the receiver room himself without saying words,” Johnson said. “I know Marvin don’t talk. Marvin, he’ll smile, laugh. He’ll say a few words. He kind of keeps to himself. Obviously, he talks, he definitely talks to his receivers, his quarterbacks, but he’s kind of reserved.”

Johnson has seen everything everybody else has: The catches, the plays, the touchdowns, the moves. It’s why he considers him “the GOAT.”

“Work ethic, that’s what it is,” Johnson said. “People think it’s his genes or it’s his height, his strength, speed.”

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BY THE END of the 2023 season, there had been 14 players who followed their Hall of Fame fathers’ footsteps.

For former safety Cody Grimm, whose father, Russ, was an offensive lineman and member of the famous “Hogs” line that helped Washington win three Super Bowls between 1981 and 1991, growing up with a Hall of Fame father gave him a front-row seat to greatness.

“It was pretty cool,” said Grimm, whose father was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2010. “I don’t know if it gives you an advantage, but it shows you how hard those guys work, how they play the game.

“Obviously, when your parents come to your games, they know how it’s supposed to be played. They’ve been around it long enough … they’re going to tell you how it should be played and you want to obviously listen to him and make him proud, so you play that way.”

Grimm never felt any pressure being the son of a Hall of Famer when he began his career as a seventh-round pick in 2010. His father never pushed football on him — he actually thinks his father wanted him to play baseball. As Grimm learned, being the son of a Hall of Famer doesn’t guarantee the gene pool is passed down. He is 5-foot-11, four inches shorter than his dad. On the other hand, Harrison is about four inches taller than his dad and “got a lot more athletic qualities than I ever had,” Grimm said.

What he lacked in size, he made up for in knowledge. Grimm would get two calls from his dad during the week when he played in the NFL. His dad’s teammates would also come over to the Grimm house, where the younger Grimm would listen to them talk shop and absorb all they had to share. “You’d hear them talk and what they did and how they worked, how their bodies feel now, and that’s what you wanna be,” Grimm said. “You learn to work and put your head down and hope for the best.”

Jarrett Payton was 7 when his father, Walter, called it a career. The elder Payton, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1993, spent his entire 13-season career as a running back with the Chicago Bears and retired as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher. His 16,726 rushing yards are now second to former Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith (18,335).

When Jarrett, who played one season with the Tennessee Titans in 2005 while also spending time in NFL Europe and the CFL, started playing football as a junior in high school, he was able to learn from one of the greatest players of all time and witnessed his father’s famous work ethic.

“My dad was way ahead of his time when it came to his workouts,” Jarrett said. “Back in the ’70s and ’80s, guys were … using camp to get into shape. My dad was already in shape before he got there. So, my dad always told me, ‘One thing is, no matter what sport you play, you gotta have a work ethic. You gotta sometimes be comfortable with being uncomfortable and sometimes that’s in your workouts where you feel you can’t go anymore, you gotta push it a little bit more.'”

The two didn’t get much time to work together on the field; his father died of bile duct cancer during Jarrett’s freshman year at Miami. The lessons he imparted on Jarrett came in those two years, through his father’s film and Jarrett’s memory.

“I watched more than us working out together. I watched a lot of him like when I was little and then also when he got older, I would sit and watch him, even his workouts after post-football,” Payton said. “And it was just different. It was different because he never got tired and when he maybe was tired, he would never let you see it. It was just a testament to his determination and will to be the best.

“His work ethic was another level and that’s what I saw and that’s what I wanted to take with me, not just in sports, but in life.”

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FITZGERALD, WHO IS eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2026, spent his entire 17-year career with the Cardinals, becoming the face of the franchise. As Fitzgerald’s career was winding down, former Arizona general manager Steve Keim attempted to find receivers Fitzgerald could mentor.

The Cardinals tried to restock their receiving room through the draft, taking seven WRs since the 2016 draft — tied for 13th most — including five in the first three rounds. None were at Fitzgerald’s level coming out of college.

Hopkins, then 28, was traded to Arizona from the Houston Texans in 2020 and played alongside Fitzgerald during his final season. But Hopkins wasn’t the long-term answer. His only 1,000-yard season with the Cardinals was followed up by 106 receptions for 1,289 yards and 11 touchdowns in 19 games between the 2021 and 2022 seasons. He was also suspended for six games in 2022 for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drug policy.

The Cardinals cut him after the ’22 season, sending the team back to the drawing (or draft) board for its next franchise receiver.

“To be honest, you, quite really, would never replace that person and fill those shoes and be who Fitz was to the Cardinals,” said former tight end Leonard Pope, who played with Fitzgerald for the first three seasons of his career before signing with the Kansas City Chiefs early in 2009.

Pope was also tasked with following a future Hall of Famer after Tony Gonzalez left Kansas City for the Falcons that season.

“I did come there to try to fulfill a tight end role that was definitely in need of being fulfilled at the time,” Pope said. “I heard small things here and there as far as the prototype, as far as the body size and probably the arm length and the height, this and that.”

Former Louisville wide receiver Keenan Burton was drafted by the St. Louis Rams in the fourth round of the 2008 draft, less than two months after the team released Isaac Bruce, a 2020 Hall of Fame inductee.

“It was pretty cool,” Burton said. “There’s big shoes to fill and, obviously, I never filled them.”

Burton heard it — and felt it — too. The tension inside the Rams building when he arrived was palpable because of Bruce’s shadow. He tried not to take it personally, even when fellow wide receiver Torry Holt let Burton know he wasn’t up to Bruce’s level.

“You’re trying personally not to make a big deal out of it,” Burton said. “But you know that what you are part of is special because of the person that you’re talking about because he was so good and so legendary.”

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FILLING THE VOID of a legendary receiver comes with its own set of expectations, questions and attention. But those who know Harrison know it’s something he’s dealt with all his life.

“It’s nothing new to him,” Morrison said. “It’s in his personality.

“He’s very steady. He’s very even. There’s not a whole lot that really rattles him.”

Harrison is one of a trio of receivers in this year’s draft who are projected to be off the board by pick No. 10. The differences between him, LSU’s Malik Nabers and Washington’s Rome Odunze are relatively small.

“If you asked every team or every scout that did all three, you might get a different order, with a consensus, maybe Marvin, but it could be Nabers and it could be Rome,” an NFL scout told ESPN. “It’s just like that. It’s like that close, just depending on what you’re looking at, what you’re looking for.”

Harrison, the scout said, is “really polished” and has “really good size” and “great hands.” His separation has been impressive, but Harrison isn’t as fast Nabers, who the scout called “explosive.” “[Nabers] could score from anywhere on the field, stretch a defense, runs excellent routes,” the scout said.

The scout said Odunze is a receiver who is “kind of a little bit between those two.”

When the gap between them is so slight, the smallest thing can help separate players. In Harrison’s case, it’s his family history.

“Knowing what he’s put into it, knowing that he’s been around professionals and knows how to act and knows not how to act, and how to work and all of those things like that,” the scout said. “The fact that it’s not going to be new to him is attached to that name.

“Yeah, I think that matters.”