Breaking down the 4 most disappointing Bengals entering the bye week
- Burrow clearly hasn't been himself
- Higgins has struggled with drops and inconsistencies
- Awuzie doesn't look as good
- Scott has had some rough outings
Tee Higgins
Like with Burrow, I do want to give Higgins some leniency as he has also been battling injury. In fact, he was only healthy for the first three games, and he had even had a great performance in Week 2 vs. the Ravens, nearly single-handedly keeping the Bengals in the game by catching the only two offensive touchdowns they had on the season up until that point.
Higgins got injured early on in Week 4 in his home state of Tennessee and missed the entirety of the Bengals' win over the Cardinals. He then had a limited role this past Sunday against the Seahawks, only being on the field for a little of 50% of their offensive snaps.
With all that said, his struggles have been even more uncharacteristic than Burrow's. Higgins has routinely been a reliable weapon in the Bengals' arsenal, a physical threat who often dominates one-on-ones and makes incredible catches. However, through Week 6, Higgins has been targeted 36 times and has only come down with the ball on 14 occasions for a disgustingly low catch percentage of just 38.9%.
Granted, his lack of production and reliability partly coincides with the fact that Burrow (as mentioned above) has also played far below expectations and has failed to hit Higgins on some of these passes, however, sometimes even when he does get it to the Clemson product, it's Higgins whose failed to keep up his end of the bargain.
Higgins already has four drops on the year (the most he's had in one full season is eight), the most egregious of which came against the Rams where he had a couple of perfectly thrown footballs land right in the bread basket, only for it to fall right through his hands.
That being said, I have seen some takes on Bengals' Twitter and Facebook that I'd call overreactions, to say the least. No, it's not time to trade or give up on Tee Higgins, calm down everyone. I'm confident he'll bounce back coming out of the bye -- especially once he fully recovers from his own ailment -- even more so than I am confident that Burrow will.