Projecting Stats for Cardinals Star Trey McBride

Arizona Cardinals fans and fantasy football nuts are beyond excited for the 2025 NFL season with the prospects of tight end Trey McBride continuing to improve.

The Colorado State product has improved over each of his first three professional seasons and signed a fat contract extension in the offseason. At the time of the signing, the deal was the richest ever at the position.

But beyond those perspectives, McBride has emerged as one of the best tight ends in the league. He posted 111 receptions for over 1,100 yards last season in an offense that had an identity crisis from Week 1-18. His efforts earned him his first of likely many career Pro Bowl selections.

With his new extension, eyes across the league will be set on McBride to see if he will continue to stack great seasons and confirm his status as an elite tight end. There's a change at the guard as stars like Travis Kelce, George Kittle and Mark Andrews begin declining and an opening is there for McBride to step in and become a face of the position.

Our question becomes - how will he look in 2025?

McBride was a reception machine last season. Will he keep up that production?

Let's start there.

Projecting Trey McBride's Stats

Receptions

High: 110
Low: 85
Prediction: 95

McBride is amongst the top tight ends in the league when it comes to target volume. Last season he was second in the league in targets with 147, but first in targets per game (he missed a single game). He was sixth in 2023 with 106 targets; 32 came in the final four games of the year (after the bye week) and 65 over the last eight games of the year.

Uncoincidentally, Kyler Murray was his quarterback for those eight games.

As long as Murray remains under center for the Cardinals, and there's little reason to believe he won't be, then McBride will get a lions share of targets. To go with his high percentage of catching said targets, we can expect another massive season from the fourth-year man.

McBride was five catches away from tying the single-season record for a tight end (116 by Zach Ertz, 2018). His 111 catches were the fourth-most in one season - and remember he missed a game.

We should feel confident in him to make another rush for that record, but a worst-case scenario will have him flirting with 100 for a second-straight season. I have him just barely under the century mark for now, but I wouldn't be surprised (and be happily wrong) if he topped triple-digits.

Receiving Yards

High: 1,150
Low: 850
Prediction: 950

I'm not sure fans understand how rare it is for tight ends to stack consecutive 1,000-yard seasons. Some of the best tight ends across the league the last several years like Mark Andrews, Zach Ertz, and Dallas Clark - even the great Jimmy Graham, perhaps a Hall of Famer one day - never recorded back-to-back 1k seasons receiving.

So, the expectation cannot be placed on McBride to do so or the season would be unsuccessful... but that doesn't mean he can't.

McBride broke out big time in 2024 after a strong 2023 campaign and he's shown no signs of slowing down to this point. He's a target hog with a high catch rate (nearly 76%) to help pad those targets. Nothing changed from last season and he might be the focal point of the passing game.

I don't foresee a drastic falloff in production and 1,000-yards is attainable. I'm going slightly under that mark under my assumption the team will run the ball more and other pass catchers like Marvin Harrison Jr will get more involved.

Touchdowns

High: 6
Low: 2
Prediction: 5

The one complaint Cardinals fans and certainly fantasy football players universally have about McBride is his lack of scoring. McBride recorded a career-best four touchdowns in 2024, one of which was a fumble recovery in the endzone.

Another score was on a two-yard run, leaving just two touchdowns through the air.

Normally, one would say this isn't sustainable, but McBride has just eight career touchdowns and six of those have come through the air. Is that simply who he is? Or is that something that could one day change?

I feel like many forget that future Hall of Famer George Kittle, arguably the best tight end in football, struggled to score in the beginning of his career. Kittle had just 14 touchdowns in his first four seasons. It didn't stop him from being an elite tight end, and for what it's worth he did end up overcoming that seemingly blocked off endzone with 31 scores in the last four years.

I won't compare McBride to Kittle, but I will say that he's producing elite numbers in spite of a lack of touchdowns.

That said, I doubt McBride will be kept out of the endzone forever and a fresh contract could motivate him to score more. I'll take him to double his career receiving touchdowns at best, but I still like him to improve overall.

Worst case scenario is he stays the way he is. It's not horrible considering everything else he does, but it remains frustrating to be sure.