Was Tee Higgins at No. 33 the right call for Bengals?

Did the Cincinnati Bengals make the right move with Tee Higgins?

Heading into Day 2 of the NFL Draft, there were a couple of names at the forefront of the minds of most Cincinnati Bengals fans. There was the receiver out of Baylor that tested like an elite athlete, there was the prominent tackle the Bengals got to spend time with in Mobile months earlier, and the pass-rushing specialist with admirable versatility out of Wisconsin to name a few. The Bengals eschewed both options at 33 however and went with the slender, jump ball maven out of Clemson with the first pick in the second round.

The selection was viewed relatively positively by Draft Twitter’s professional class, but I think it’s fair to say that the fanbase absorbed the news unevenly. Some pointed to Higgins atrocious pro day as evidence that the receiver was overvalued by the organization and exclaimed that there were better options available at 33, while others were appreciably higher on the selection. Most critiques were made in good faith and are not to be dismissed out of hand, so I want to take some time to evaluate Higgins and his prospects going forward.

 

The Player Eval

The first point I want to concede in the interest of honest discussion is that Higgins is not a speed merchant. That’s obvious from an analysis of his film and has nothing to do with the circumstances surrounding his testing numbers. It’s perhaps just as important to note that a lack of high-end foot speed won’t make or break Higgins in terms of his viability in the league. That’s because Higgins has a few exceptional traits that allowed him to be a dynamic player on the college level and should allow him to have success moving forward. The North Star for Higgins’ physical profile (in terms of his actual dimensions) is AJ Green, and here, Higgins is essentially a carbon copy of the historic receiver prospect the Bengals nabbed out of Georgia. Higgins is a hair under 6’4 (just like Green), with 34.125 inch arms (a tick shorter than Green’s arm length). He weighed in at 216 pounds, five pounds heavier than AJ did in 2011. That makes for an elite grade in terms of the size component of his RAS (via the wonderful @Mathbomb). With the average NFL corner standing at 5’11, and the average slot corner being even shorter than that, Higgins will immediately have a significant size advantage over most (nearly all in fact) of the cornerbacks attempting to guard him. That size creates matchup problems for defensive backs vertically as well as horizontally given that Higgins has shown the ability to use his body to shield corners on comebacks, posts, square-ins and quick out routes.

This play didn’t count (and Higgins was also injured making the reception), but it’s still instructive because you can see the high-point ability and the length disparity between Higgins and even a corner as physically gifted as Okudah.

Beyond that, Higgins does show adequate route quickness and quality long speed on the field. In regard to his route quickness and general flexibility, given how leggy he is, he shows an ability to sink his hips and maintain decent velocity out of breaks.

Higgins averaged 20 yards a catch this year on 59 catches, the second time in his career he floated in that range, and the floor for him in that area was the 16 yards a catch he averaged as a sophomore. He demonstrates some suddenness getting off the line of scrimmage, satisfactory acceleration to get into routes quickly, and his stride length and build up speed allows him to stack corners with some consistency.

And the body control of course is EXEMPLARY. Higgins might not have the sheer gracefulness Green has, but he’s able to contort his body in ways that are uncommon for a 6’4 receiver with his length.

It’s not all rainbows and lollipops of course, Higgins has struggled with physical press-man to date (something that can be improved but ultimately likely won’t be entirely surmounted given the slender frame and the sheer amount of surface area he presents to corners given his size), and he’s not an elite separator. That’s why he was available at the top of round two though, because he is not a flawless prospect. He is however a very intriguing one, a WR talent with outstanding height and length, quality suddenness and decent quickness for his size. A WR with the phenomenal ball tracking ability and body control, and a WR with some run after the catch acumen. Certainly the type of receiver worth expending a second-round pick on.

 

The Pro Day Debacle

It’s very difficult to argue that Higgins’ pro day results were anything other than abysmal, but I do want to make two points about them. The first being that Higgins claims that he was injured in the lead up to the pro day (impacting his preparation for the even), and that he stated immediately after the event that his hamstring tightened up on him during the 40-yard dash portion of his testing. I’m generally not inclined to believe post hoc spin about poor results, but there is some contemporaneous corroboration for his claim. As I said, Higgins made the initial claim immediately after the event and prior to the draft twitter fall out, he skipped Combine testing entirely which could be construed as evidence of an injury (although this is a bit more tenuous given that prospects have been known to hide subpar testing numbers by skipping certain drills at the event), and finally, TJ Houshmandzadeh stated in a recent interview with the New Stripe City Boys that he and Higgins’ agent explicitly told him not to workout at his pro day given his physical state (and ostensibly his lack of preparedness). This DOES NOT mean that the testing numbers accrued at Higgins’ pro day should be ignored, but I do think that the disparity in his demonstrated on-field ability combined with his Higgins’ pedigree (five-star recruit considered a high-end athlete coming into college along with his exploits on the basketball court) should make you amenable to the case that he was at least somewhat impacted by his hamstring during the training process and on testing day. But, let’s say that you aren’t in a charitable mood. Let’s say you’re a disciple of the church of no excuses. Let’s analyze things from that perspective.

I’ve been reticent to disclose this (lest you think less of me), but I’m an attorney by trade. I only reveal that embarrassing bit of information because I want to utilize a common lawyering technique we occasionally use when attempting to construct a cogent defense for a client (and this is law school 101 type of stuff so I promise that it’s not needlessly pedantic). In this type of thought experiment, we construe the facts of a case entirely against our client (and in favor of the opposition) in order to establish the outer bounds of our defense (and to analyze the viability of the case against your client in a worst case scenario). Let’s apply that here. Let’s say that Higgins’ testing numbers are entirely representative of the type of athlete that he is and were not impacted whatever by any physical ailment (or any subsequent lack of preparation). Would those numbers themselves prevent Higgins from being successful at the next level? In other words, has there been a receiver with Higgins’ physical profile with comparable testing numbers that has come to the league recently and showed promise? Why yes…yes there has been. Last year, prior to his injury, Preston Williams appeared to be one of the most promising rookie receivers in the league. In eight career games to start his career (and in seven starts), Williams had 32 catches for 428 yards and three touchdowns. Extrapolated over a 16 game season, that’s a tidy 64 catch, 856 yard 6 touchdown rookie campaign. That’s a nice rookie campaign by pretty much anyone’s standards, and that’s not even factoring into the equation Miami’s situation last year (uncertainty at QB, lack of talent along the offensive line and in the RB room etc.). Williams’ pro day was equally abysmal with a nearly identical 40 and explosion numbers (31.5 inch vert for example) at 6’4 211 pounds. Indeed the primary separator for Higgins and Williams is that Higgins, beyond having an actual injury question, is also a developmental year younger than Williams was at the time of their respective workouts (implying a longer runway for physical growth). Either way, Williams demonstrated that he could win at the next level with a Higgins-identical physical profile and that’s again construed in the most uncharitable light for Higgins.

 

Static Production Across Multiple Seasons

The other substantive criticism of Higgins came in the form of a critique of his relatively stagnant production across his final two seasons in addition to his dominator rating. I’ll address the similar production across both seasons, you can adjudge the value of dominator ratings for yourself (Terry McLaurin I think demonstrates how problematic that analytic tool is but I recognize the affinity for the metric that some have, and I don’t begrudge its use). Higgins posted 59 catches for 936 yards and 12 touchdowns as a sophomore and followed that up with 59 catches for 1167 yards and 13 TDs as a junior. Not identical statlines obviously, but the disparity wasn’t large enough to demonstrate the type of progression year over year that some would prefer. It’s a legitimate thing to point out. The thing about that though, is that none of the key pass receiving weapons saw statistical gains last year for Clemson, and in fact, Justyn Ross saw his production drop across the board (with the exception of total receptions). It’s difficult to formulate a causal analysis on a thing with this many moving parts, but the law of parsimony would seem to infer that the constraint on Clemson’s offense was not a byproduct of the disparate receiving pieces and indeed, a closer inspection of Trevor Lawrence demonstrates that the uber-talented sophomore regressed in some areas despite the gaudy counting numbers. That’s not to diminish Lawrence in any way (he’s still clearly the most gifted passer to grace college football in some time imo), or to lay the blame for Clemson’s early-season struggles entirely at his feet, but QB development is not entirely linear, and his play was not as clean as it had been the previous year (likely the product of the Clemson staff broadening his scope of responsibilities as staffs are want to do with more experienced QBs), and when you consider just how many mouths Clemson had to keep satiated, it’s not actually surprising that Higgins didn’t see an appreciable jump in his production last season.

 

Conclusion

As you’ve probably gleaned from the article, I am a believer in Higgins’ skill-set and have been for some time.

That doesn’t mean that I’m oblivious to the areas of concern for him or that I don’t see a pathway to non-production for him, but I think he has a clearly defined set of abilities that he should be able to utilize to win consistently on the next level. For a receiver at pick 33, that’s about as much as you can ask for.

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