The people who build and coach NFL rosters rank Trey McBride as the second-best tight end in football. In ESPN’s annual positional survey of league executives, coaches and scouts, published Friday by Jeremy Fowler, the Arizona Cardinals tight end landed at No. 2 behind the Raiders’ Brock Bowers, with George Kittle, Sam LaPorta and Tyler Warren rounding out the top five.
The gap between first and second was real but narrow: McBride drew more than 30 percent of the first-place votes. His case rests on a 2025 season with little precedent at the position. His 126 receptions were the most by a tight end in a single NFL season. He averaged 72.9 receiving yards per game, nearly 16 more than any other tight end. His 566 yards after the catch led the position by 90. And his 11 receiving touchdowns tied for second in the entire league, at any position.
That production still wasn’t enough to unseat Bowers, and the voting pattern says something about how evaluators weigh the two. McBride’s résumé is the finished product — volume, efficiency and red-zone results, all at once. Bowers’ hold on the top spot reflects how the league projects his ceiling as much as what he has already put on film. Voters were effectively choosing between what McBride has done and what they believe Bowers will do.
For Arizona, the ranking matters less than the plan behind it. New head coach Mike LaFleur inherits an offense in which McBride is the established No. 1 option in the passing game alongside Marvin Harrison Jr., and the 26-year-old’s usage — the catches, the yards after catch, the target share — is the foundation any LaFleur scheme will be built on. Cardinals veterans report to camp on July 22, and how LaFleur deploys McBride in a new system will be one of the first real answers of the summer.
There is also a simple developmental read here: two years ago McBride was a promising second-round pick fighting for snaps, and he now sits a handful of votes from being the consensus best player at his position. The distance left to close is no longer about production. It is about one more season that forces the projection argument to end.
