Tee Higgins 2026 Season Preview — strip the touchdowns and what's left | Muffed

Tee Higgins scored eleven touchdowns on fifty-nine catches last year — a touchdown on nearly every fifth reception. That rate is why he finished WR12, and it's exactly why we'd let someone else draft him at WR17. Strip the touchdowns and he was a fifty-six-yard-a-game receiver. The Muffed 2026 preview.

The season: twelve-one a game, WR12 per game, fifteen games — but the shape is everything. Eleven touchdowns on fifty-nine catches, a roughly nineteen percent receiving-touchdown rate, much of it on deep balls in a season where Cincinnati cycled from Joe Burrow to Joe Flacco. His big plays were forty-four-yard and forty-two-yard scores — boom-or-bust touchdown variance, not steady volume. Three games over twenty points, five under ten.

The arc is a touchdown roller coaster: nine-seven, then fifteen-five in a twelve-game 2024, then twelve-one. The common thread in his good years is an elevated touchdown rate, and touchdown rate is the least repeatable stat we track.

Here's the core of the call. His touchdown share is thirty-one-point-two percent — deep into the quartile where our WR fade rule fires, the most touchdown-dependent priced receiver in this range. He's the number two option next to Ja'Marr Chase, on an eighteen percent target share — solid, but not the volume that sustains a high finish without the scores. And he's a career-year-six receiver. The receiving line underneath the touchdowns is a complementary one.

[[SITUATION]]

The situation cuts both ways, per the reports: Burrow says this is the best he's felt in a long time, fully participating through minicamp after his injury-marred 2025 — genuinely good for Higgins, since a full Burrow season raises the floor. But it also means Higgins competes with a healthy Ja'Marr Chase, freshly extended for a hundred sixty-one million dollars, for the same targets, and his own recurring obstacle is durability; he's missed games in back-to-back years, even after reworking his offseason recovery process this year. A healthy Burrow doesn't fix a touchdown rate that has to come back to earth.

The price: pick thirty-nine, the seventeenth receiver. [pause] Verdict: CALL — overpriced. You're paying for [emphasis] eleven touchdowns from the second option in a receiver room that just got more expensive at the top, and that's the stat that regresses hardest. The counter, fairly: a full Burrow season is a real tailwind, and elite quarterback play can sustain a higher touchdown rate than average. But the base rate is brutal for this profile, and the volume underneath doesn't catch him if the scores dip.

September watch: the touchdown rate, the whole call; and his target share next to a healthy Chase, plus his own availability after the offseason recovery changes. [[CLOSE]] If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.