Tee Higgins — Week 1: Twenty-Nine on Third and Ten, One Taken Back
2026 NFL Season · Half-PPR Scoring · Monday, Sep 14
Higgins caught three of six targets for fifty-nine yards — twelve, twenty-nine on third and ten, and eighteen on second and ten with two thirteen left that let Cincinnati run out the clock. A fourth catch, thirty-three yards deep right with one forty-seven left in the third, was challenged by Tampa Bay and reversed. His six targets carried a hundred seventeen air yards, the most on either team, in a 33–27 win over the Buccaneers.
When Tee Higgins's week moves the numbers, you'll know — every episode, in one weekly email.
The full episode, in writing
Tee Higgins caught a 33-yard pass Sunday that does not count. First and 10 at the Cincinnati 22, one 47 left in the third quarter, on Cincinnati's first possession after Josiah Trotter's interception return had cut the lead to 27 to 20: Joe Burrow deep right, Higgins to the Tampa Bay 45, and Tampa Bay challenged the ruling on the field. It was reversed. Incomplete, −0.6 expected points added — expected points added is what a play was worth given down, distance and field position — and two plays later Mike Gesicki caught the third and 10 that bailed the drive out.
The catches that stood were the ones that mattered to the scoreboard. Third and 10 at the Cincinnati 27, 13 37 left in the third, Bengals up 24 to 10: short middle to Higgins, pushed out at the Tampa Bay 44, 29 yards, +3.0 expected points, the best play by that measure on his line and the second-best on Burrow's. That drive ended in a 55-yard field goal. And with two 13 left in the fourth, second and 10 at the Tampa Bay 44, Cincinnati up 33 to 27: deep middle, 18 yards to the 26, a first down that led to a third-and-one sneak and a kneel. Burrow said afterward he put it where only Higgins could get it, per John Sheeran at A to Z Sports.
The line: six targets, three catches, 59 yards, no touchdowns, +2.3 on the targets. A hundred 17 air yards on six throws — one of them a 45-yarder deep middle with 12 oh four left in the second quarter that fell incomplete — is the deepest set of targets anyone on either team saw. The other incompletion was second and 10 with one 41 left in the third, short left. Two of the six targets came before halftime, four after, on a day Ja'Marr Chase was thrown to four times in total. Higgins was tied for second on the team in targets, six apiece with Chase Brown, behind Gesicki's seven and first in yards among the wide receivers.
Back in June the preview's read was WR12 on touchdowns rather than target volume, 80 percent availability, and the title was strip the touchdowns and what's left. Sunday was the answer to that title played out in one game: no touchdowns, and what was left was a third-and-10 conversion, the throw that sealed it, and the deepest air-yard share on the field. One game does not turn a touchdown-dependent read into a volume one. It was, though, the kind of game the preview was hoping to see. Cincinnati is at the Texans on Sunday the twentieth.
_Data via nflverse._
When Tee Higgins's week moves the numbers, you'll know — every episode, in one weekly email.
Keep going