Trey McBride is going in the late second round of fantasy drafts this summer, and the analyst who ranks him as the No. 2 tight end in football still can't bring himself to draft him there. "I haven't landed on him once this offseason," Pro Football Network's Jason Katz said. "If he falls, he falls. We can have that discussion in the middle of round 3, but at the end of round 2, I don't think there's enough separation from him in tier 2 at the tight end position."
The hesitation isn't about talent. McBride has 237 catches over the past two seasons, a number that most tight ends don't reach in targets, let alone receptions. He finished as one of the best values in fantasy football last year. The problem is the price tag attached to his 2026 campaign, and the structural changes around him in Arizona.
The Cardinals overhauled their coaching staff in the offseason and invested heavily in the backfield, which points toward a more balanced offense. The sheer volume of passes Arizona threw in 2025 is close to a lock to regress in a massive way. That alone would normally ding a pass-catching tight end's ceiling. But the bigger variable is at quarterback.
Jacoby Brissett unlocked McBride for 11 touchdowns last season, a number that looked impossible after the tight end's scoring struggles in prior years. Katz attributes the breakout to a simple mechanical issue with the previous starter. "Turns out that's a Kyler Murray problem," he said. "He can't see over the linemen."
The risk, as Katz frames it, is that Brissett gets benched late in a lost season. If Arizona is 3-10 and fighting for nothing, the team might want to see what rookie Carson Beck has. Katz isn't worried about that scenario. "You know what Carson Beck is? He's 6'4". That's half a foot taller than Kyler Murray, and I think that's all it takes to get McBride the ball," he said. "When a dude like this is open across the middle of the field, you get him the ball if you can see him."
Katz prefers Brissett in the lineup, but he considers the Beck risk overblown. The concern that keeps him from drafting McBride at cost is economic, not athletic. A late second-round pick is a crazy premium to pay for a onesie position, even for a player of McBride's caliber. Katz said he would take McBride over Josh Allen if comparing onesie positions, and he ranks him over Brock Bowers by the thinnest of margins. Neither is someone he's drafting at their current price.
The tight end landscape behind the top two is shifting. Katz pointed to Tyler Warren and Colston Loveland as players who could enter that tier and wipe out the pick differential between drafting them and drafting McBride. His PFN consensus board for 2026 lists Bowers first, McBride second, then Loveland, Tucker Kraft, Warren and Sam LaPorta. George Kittle, Harold Fannin Jr., Kyle Pitts Sr., Dalton Kincaid and Isaiah Likely round out the top 11.
Katz is drafting Likely late in drafts this year, a player he calls inferior to McBride but one whose cost makes sense. "The dollars make sense when it comes to a guy like that," he said.
The production floor remains intact. McBride has two fewer catches than Bowers has targets since the start of 2024, establishing him as the premium floor play at the position. The Week 1 matchup against the Chargers doesn't change that picture. Los Angeles owned the fourth-best red zone defense in 2025, but they were worse than league average in yards per attempt allowed on balls thrown under 10 yards and had the 10th-worst touchdown rate allowed to tight ends.
No defense has presented a real blueprint for stopping McBride. Opponents are left with a let him get his and contain the rest approach, which should allow the tight end to deliver the positional edge managers drafted him for. The question is whether that edge justifies the second-round investment.
Katz doesn't think McBride scores 11 times again. If that number dips to seven, the production over replacement starts to shrink. "He's a great player with a great season coming, and the same goes for Brock Bowers," he said. "Am I drafting either where their price tags dictate? No."
McBride's ADP sits at the 2/3 turn, and Katz's rankings place him at No. 2 among tight ends on the PFN consensus board. The gap between those two facts is where the debate lives.
According to Yahoo Sports.