NFL.com recently published an article listing the league’s most underappreciated players in the AFC, and former Clemson star Tee Higgins was tabbed as one of those underappreciated players despite the fact that the Cincinnati Bengals receiver is coming off back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons.
NFL Network Analytics Expert Cynthia Frelund, who authored the article for NFL.com, came up with her list of underappreciated players using her context-based models.
As Frelund noted in her article, she began by calculating and then ranking each player’s season-long contribution metric by team — or win share, which measures each player’s production in the prior season (in this case, the 2022 season) and lends insight into each player’s contribution to their team’s overall win total.
While the contribution metric is the most important part of Frelund’s method, she also factored in each player’s salary by position, using contract data from Over The Cap, in order to get context around which players were being “underappreciated.” Frelund then weighted players drafted in the second round or later who have no more than two Pro Bowl nods to their names and aren’t top-10 players at their position.
With all of that said, here is why Frelund deemed Higgins as one of the NFL’s most underappreciated players in the AFC:
“Going with Higgins feels a little like cheating, since he qualifies as “underappreciated” in part because he’s still on his affordable rookie contract — at least, for now. There’s no denying his impact in Cincinnati. Per computer vision, he ranked among the top 18 wideouts in win-share ranking in 2021; last season, that ranking jumped to 14th. NGS shows Higgins earned 207 receiving yards over expected on passes of 10-plus air yards, ranking fourth best in the NFL. He led the league in catch rate over expected when targeted in the middle third of the field (13.1%), and he finished fifth in the NFL in catch rate when targeted on in-breaking routes (81.1%).”
The 24-year-old Higgins is entering the final year of his rookie contract and is eligible for a contract extension. He’s going into his fourth NFL season after being selected by the Bengals in the second round (33rd overall) of the 2020 NFL Draft.
Over his first three NFL seasons, Higgins has caught 215 passes for 3,028 yards and 19 touchdowns. He has tallied exactly 74 receptions in each of the last two seasons while racking up more than 1,000 receiving yards in each of those seasons as well.
Last season, Higgins finished with 1,029 yards and seven touchdowns on those 74 catches.
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