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.
Dan Fornek’s Tee Higgins Projection
Higgins had a career year in a contract season in 2024 despite missing five games due to injury. Higgins caught 73 of 109 targets for 911 yards and 10 touchdowns in 12 games, posting a career-best 18.5 PPR points per game. That got him a WR5 finish among receivers who played at least eight games.
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There was hope that Higgins would have an opportunity to sign elsewhere this offseason and emerge as the top wide receiver for a new team. Still, he re-signed with the Bengals to serve as the second option in the passing attack. In truth, that status doesn’t matter much to the Bengals. Over the last four seasons, Joe Burrow has averaged 36.3 passing attempts per game while completing 69.2% of his passes. There is more than enough volume to go around in Cincinnati.
The Bengals will be forced to pass the ball again in 2025, thanks to a bad defense forcing the team into negative game scripts. That means that Higgins should have no problem seeing the volume needed to finish as a top 12 wide receiver in fantasy again. The most significant risk to his success in fantasy is an injury to Joe Burrow behind one of the worst offensive lines in the NFL.
