Fantasy Football Today - Tee Higgins Profile: As Good as Chase??? (07/10 Fantasy Football Podcast)

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

You might be surprised to hear the numbers for Tee Higgins and Ja'Marr Chase when they were both on the field in 2021. What do we make of them as it relates to 2022? You can also follow the full-length Fantasy Football Today podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fantasy-football-today-podcast/id261735167 Get 20% off Fantasy Football Today merch: https://store.cbssports.com/collections/fantasy-football-today%20?utm_source=podcast-apple-com&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=buy-our-merch&utm_content=fantasy-football-collection Follow our FFT team on Twitter: @FFToday, @AdamAizer, @JameyEisenberg, @daverichard, @heathcummingssr, @ctowerscbs, You can listen to Fantasy Football Today in 5 on your smart speakers! Simply say "Alexa, play the latest episode of the Fantasy Football Today in 5 podcast" or "Hey Google, play the latest episode of the Fantasy Football Today in 5 podcast." Watch FFT on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/fantasyfootballtoday Join our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/FantasyFootballToday/ Sign up for the FFT newsletter https://www.cbssports.com/newsletter To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does possible sound like for your business? It's having the spend to power your scale with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. T Higgins is currently a mid-round three pick, around 30th overall. He is a top 12 wide receiver, around 12 or so in most

places where you find ADP. Let's see what Jacob Gibbs and the advanced metrics have to say about Tee Higgins. Welcome to Fantasy Football Today in 5. We previewed or profiled Bradley Jamal Chase on our Saturday edition. Today, his teammate, Tee Higgins. All right, we like Tee Higgins. Jacob, lay it out for me. You saw a lot of progress in your team. Yeah, I love Tee Higgins, Jacob, lay it out for me. You saw a lot of progress in year two. Yeah, I love T. Higgins. He was really, really impressive as a rookie. He was one of the most efficient receivers in a stacked rookie receiver class, and that was even with just horrible QB play as a rookie.

So I was really excited for him in year two, and he did not disappoint. He finished seventh in yards per outrun and was second in explosive reception rate, which is the percentage of targets that resulted in a gain of 15 or more yards, top 10, and basically any deep target metric. And this all came in a weird year where he really didn't find his footing until exactly halfway into his 14-game season, which also happens to be the splits before and after Cincinnati's week 10 bye.

Okay. So let's go into those splits then. Cause yeah, they're pretty telling, huh? Yeah. From week 11 on Higgins yard per outrun rate was 2.64 for the season. Only Cooper cup, Debo Samuel and Vontae Adams had a higher rate. So that's really elite stuff. Over the second half of the season for Higgins, his explosive reception rate was at 42% over the final seven games. Earlier, I mentioned that his season-long rate was the second highest in the NFL. That was 26%. It was 42% to close the year out. And he also saw higher volume and just outproduced Jamar Chase during the second half of the season, which wasn't just an end of season thing, though. As we mentioned in Jamar's profile, on the year when

both receivers were on the field, Higgins was kind of the 1A to Chase as a 1B. I don't know if that's going to continue. I wouldn't label them as such, but in 469 routes together, Higgins out-targeted Chase, 108 to 93, had 1,300 area yards to Chase's 1,200, and outscored him in PBR formats. Joe Burrow was 16% more likely to target Higgins than Chase when both players were on the field. So really, really good stuff to close out the year once he was finally healthy.

Once they came out of the bye, he did look like the number one receiver, and when both players were on the field last year, he produced that way and just you know to hammer home that targets point in the postseason they played four games jamar chase had 35 targets and t higgins had 30 targets jamar chase had one touchdown t higgins had two uh chase had 368 yards higgins had 309 yards so you know pretty similar. And Joe Burrow was only on pace for 21 touchdown passes in those four postseason games,

21 in 17 games, only through five touchdowns in those four games. So there's more touchdowns to be had there. But all right, so that's kind of a look at the splits between those two guys. And you want to give a historical comparison for T. Higgins. Yeah, and on the touchdown point, I wrote an article about players who are expected to have touchdown regression this year. Last year's article, I hit 13 or 14 of those, and it's just looking at the data,

and T. Higgins really got unlucky with touchdowns last year. I think he was 22nd percentile among qualified receivers in touchdown dependency rating. The percentage was fantasy points that can't be at touchdowns, whereas Jamar really did have kind of good luck, as we talked about on yesterday's episode so that's just another thing working in t higgins uh favor so in terms of some historic comparisons here we've thrown a lot of percentages um i just want to kind of line them up against some of the best recent young breakout receivers that we've seen and see how he compares um so it's not going to be quite as gaudy as the

jamar chase numbers because what he did as a 21 year old is something we really haven't ever seen before. Um, but Higgins averaged 2.26 yards per out run in 2021, which is the rate that only six other qualified receivers have topped at the age of 22 or younger since 2010. So over the past 12 seasons, um, there've only been six other receivers who have been as efficient on a per route basis as T. Higgins was as a 22 year old and the only receivers with both a higher yard per route run rate and explosive reception rate from that subset 83 players was Josh Gordon, Justin Jefferson and Mike Evans so I think Evans is probably the guy I would compare him to of those three and we've obviously seen him be one of the most productive fantasy receivers

for quite a long time now. So everything really points towards Higgins being a top, I think potentially top eight guy, top six guy as a third year player here. And I'm really, really excited. I definitely prefer him over Chase at cost. At cost. Okay.

I know you love Michael Pittman. Who do you like better, Pittman or Higgins? It's clearly Higgins. Oh, cost. Okay. I know you love Michael Pittman. Who do you like better? Pittman or Higgins? It's clearly Higgins. Oh, okay. Okay. How about DJ more now or Higgins?

Uh, I need to run projection on that, but I'm still pretty sure that it's T Higgins. Okay. T Higgins forever for Jacob Gibbs. Follow him on Twitter at J a Gibbs underscore 23. And we'll talk to you on Monday on Fantasy Football Today.