Tee Higgins’ contract was part of the drama this offseason, but he’s back as a key contributor to this explosive offense for another season after signing a new deal. He’s missed 10 games over the past two seasons, but he’s entering only his age-26 season and is coming off a year that saw him catch a career-best 10 touchdown passes.
Should you consider Cincinnati’s second receiver an option to fill the WR1 void on your fantasy football roster in 2025?
Tee Higgins’ Fantasy Outlook
It’s easy to glance at Higgins’ game log from a season ago and think that the huge Week 17 performance against the Broncos (11-131-3) elevated his numbers to a level above what he can sustain, but that’s not the case.
Yes, that was a great game, and it fueled him as the fourth-highest scoring receiver from Weeks 11-17. That’s true. He was better in terms of production over expectation during those weeks than Ja’Marr Chase, flashing upside that is rare for a secondary option. But it’s not as if we hadn’t seen such stats pile up before. Higgins was WR5 in Weeks 5-7, once he got his season on the rails.
When all was said and done in 2024, despite playing across from the sixth receiving Triple Crown winner, he posted career highs in receptions (6.1) and targets (9.1) per game. He averaged 18.5 PPR points per game (WR5) and gave you not one, not two, but three weekly finishes even better than that.
When Tee Higgins’ mom left him a special message before the Super Bowl 🥹 pic.twitter.com/AmeNUm2Bo4
— Football’s Greatest Moments (@FBGreatMoments) July 10, 2025
There were minor blips on the radar, but that happens for 95% of receivers, if not more. He had three weeks where he wasn’t a top-30 PPR receiver during the fantasy season, and that hurts when it happens, though it should be noted that Brian Thomas Jr. (four such games) and A.J. Brown (six), among others, had similar blemish rates.
Outside of those outliers, there is nothing to pick apart in this profile. The gravity that Chase provides allows Higgins to overachieve target expectation consistently (career: 11.6% better than NFL average given his target quality), and 2024 wasn’t some sort of unsustainable run of efficiency (+10.6%). He made the most of seeing at least one end zone target in two-thirds of his games and gave his managers a career-best 2.06 PPR points per target.
What allowed for that level of success?
Higgins posted the lowest average depth of target (11.2 yards), and while that trims some of the upside off of his overall profile, the floor-raising nature of it more than covers the downside.
In eight of his 11 games during the fantasy season, he caught at least five passes, a level of involvement that, given his playmaking acumen, makes him as close to a sure thing week-over-week once you get outside of the receivers being selected in the first round of fantasy drafts this season.
For Higgins to fail this season, it would require an injury or drastic improvements on the defensive end that significantly change the game environment that he so often benefited from in 2024.
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We draft deep rosters to protect against missed games, and I don’t want to speak for you, but I see no reason to think that Cincinnati, after last year’s 28th-place finish in PFSN’s Defense+ Rankings, will trend toward the middle third of NFL defenses.
Drafting Higgins passes every smell test, and the cautious approach that some managers have around drafting a WR2 on his team has kept his price as reasonable in what I expect to be another very profitable season, and one that lands him a new deal in the offseason.
Mason LeBeau‘s Tee Higgins Projection
Tee Higgins is the ultimate fantasy glass cannon. A part of the incredible Bengals’ offense, Higgins is good enough in his own right to be most teams’ WR1, but instead gets favorable coverages as defenses scramble to cover Ja’Marr Chase. Joe Burrow throws it enough to feed both players, and their porous defense ensures that those opportunities won’t go away. Expect more of the same in 2025 — he’s a fantastic play if healthy.Â
Higgins has only played one full season, which came in his rookie year. He rarely misses significant time, only a few games per season, but he’ll struggle to finish games or play injured, leading to inconsistent output. He missed the most time in his career in 2024, starting just nine games and appearing in 12. That led him to just missing 1,000 total yards and finishing as WR19, yet he was third in points per game, and second among players with four or more games.Â
The only thing that has changed is his asking price. Everyone knows how lethal this offense can be and how good Higgins is, so his WR13 price places him among Tyreek Hill, Ladd McConkey, and Jaxon Smith-Ngjibga. This time last year, he was WR27, going below Amari Cooper and George Pickens. That makes him a far riskier bet this year. Personally, I believe scared money doesn’t make money, but I’d feel much better if he were my WR2 instead of my WR1.Â
