Tee Higgins Camp Update — August 16: One Classic Touchdown, Same Open Question
2026 NFL Season · Monday, Aug 17
Tee Higgins won a scrimmage rep exactly the way he won last season — a leaping, contested touchdown over a cornerback. The talent for those was never the question. The count is.
Follow Tee Higgins and get every episode, every week.
The full episode, in writing
Tee Higgins scored the touchdown of Cincinnati's camp scrimmage, and it was the most Tee Higgins play imaginable. Back on August 9, in the Bengals' scrimmage-style practice — roughly 70 unscripted plays with thud tackling — Higgins took a third-and-goal from the 18 on an isolation go route against cornerback DJ Ivey, fought through hand-checking downfield, went up over Ivey to secure Joe Burrow's loft, and extended the ball across the goal line to beat the punch-out, per Geoff Hobson at bengals.com. Since then, quiet: Higgins wasn't mentioned in the preseason-opener coverage, where the starters played only the opening series.
The June preview's core claim was that Higgins's season was built on touchdowns, and touchdowns are rented. 11 scores on 59 catches — a touchdown on nearly every fifth reception, a rate that history regresses hard — sitting on top of a complementary target share as the second option next to Ja'Marr Chase. Strip the scores and he was a 56-yard-a-game receiver. We never doubted he could make spectacular contested scoring plays; the argument was that no receiver sustains that conversion rate, and the volume underneath doesn't catch him when it cools.
So here's the honest reading of one scrimmage rep: it confirms the part of the profile that was never in dispute. Higgins winning a jump ball in the end zone is why the touchdown rate got as high as it did. It tells us nothing about the number that decides his season — how many of those opportunities an 18 percent target share generates across 17 games, with a healthy Chase commanding the ball. One August rep can't move a regression argument in either direction, and we won't pretend otherwise.
Does the June read hold? UNCHANGED — the touchdown-dependency read was a claim about rates over a full season, and a single contested scrimmage score neither feeds it nor refutes it.
Next week: whether Higgins sees red-zone work with the starters in preseason game two, and any camp reporting on how the targets split between him and Chase when both are on the field. We'll check next Sunday.
_Data via nflverse._
Keep going