Advertisement

Week 6 Care/Don't Care: Bengals fans, fantasy managers should hope Tee Higgins-Joe Burrow marriage stays intact

matt harmon
Fantasy analyst

Forgive me for quoting myself, but I will reference the exact sequence I wrote in my Week 6 preview column about this game because it feels pertinent to tonight’s result for the Bengals offense.

We do all these thought exercises in the offseason about how the Bengals can evolve on offense in the future with Tee Higgins likely exiting in 2025. Then we get into the games, and it's so clear that not only the offense but, frankly, this entire operation, doesn’t have a prayer unless Joe Burrow is out there throwing haymakers to his two stars on the perimeter.

I come out of this Week 6 win — a night where the offense wasn’t even at its best — as confused as ever about how any plan that involves splitting Higgins from Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase makes any sense.

The Giants defense was dedicating extra resources to double-cover Chase. Any team that walks into a game against the Bengals prepares to take Chase out of the game. Few can pull it off and the Bengals have made it more challenging than ever to do it this year.

Chase has moved around to play every receiver position this season and has taken more reps than ever in the slot. He took 11 snaps in the slot in this game, per TruMedia. And still, the Giants did a decent job at it, holding Chase to 72 yards on six targets and limiting an offense that was rolling coming into Week 6.

With Chase drawing that extra defensive attention, Higgins was left in one-on-one situations. Higgins was shadowed by Deonte Banks on 87% of his routes, per Next Gen Stats, and caught all five of his targets for 54 yards against the Giants’ corner. Higgins did most of his damage on short passes as the outlet, chain-moving receiver. Considering the pressure Burrow was under against the Giants' ferocious defensive line, that was a key factor in the Bengals doing anything at all on offense.

Chase gave a post-game interview to NBC where he essentially said this was exactly what the Bengals expected to see. If they were able to block up front better than they did, we’d have likely gotten an even bigger statistical result. For now, what we got in Week 6 reaffirmed the core identity of this unit when the Big Three are together.

The Bengals are now 2-4 on the season. They have a long way to go but they face the Browns, Eagles and Raiders in the next three weeks. That is a soft enough schedule for the Bengals to feel confident they can get rolling if the defense plays at the level it did tonight and the protection improves up front.

There are plenty of “ifs” involved in the equation but Cincinnati could be in much better shape than we once expected when it rematches with the Ravens in Week 10.

Derrick Henry has cleared 130 rushing yards in three of his last four games, and Lamar Jackson has thrown for more than 300 yards in back-to-back weeks. There have been some soft defensive matchups of late, especially against the Bengals' and Commanders’ secondaries the last two weeks. However, the multi-layered firepower we’re seeing from the Ravens offense is real.

We all know that Henry and the running game is great, but it was under-discussed going into the week that the Ravens ranked as a top-five passing-success-rate offense. The efficiency has been there all season, and now we’ve seen that the overall production has been fantastic when Jackson and co. can cut it loose.

You can tell that Todd Monken has gotten more comfortable taking the leash off the passing game of late. Much of that has to do with improved play up front. An offensive line that was a question mark all offseason, and looked like it would be a huge problem early in the season, has turned the corner. Left tackle Ronnie Stanley looks the best he has in years. He may not be all the way back to his All-Pro form but he’s put up great tape this season. Rookie tackle Roger Rosengarten has stepped in to stabilize the right tackle position.

With time up front, Jackson has been encouraged to push the ball down the field. I’ve always been higher than consensus on this Ravens wide receiver room and we’re finally starting to see it.

Zay Flowers has stacked back-to-back 100-yard games. While he still gets a bit of work in the screen and gadget game because he’s so dynamic with the ball in his hands, the Ravens have finally concentrated on getting him the ball on big-boy routes. Next Gen Stats notes that Flowers caught five passes for 73 yards on in-breaking routes in this win over Washington. There’s no reason he can’t be a legitimate downfield threat.

Rashod Bateman continues to quietly be a big factor in the offense. The Ravens wideout caught all four of his targets for 71 yards, winning in the intermediate area and helping to move the chains. Bateman has always been painfully underutilized in Baltimore as an A+ separator in the intermediate area over the middle and on curl routes against man coverage. He has several big catches on such concepts over the last two weeks.

Jackson called the Ravens a “pick your poison offense” after the Week 6 win, and that’s precisely what they’ve become. Henry’s play and standing as the fantasy RB1 will continue to get the headlines; he deserves them but don’t forget to mention that we’re in the middle of one of the most dynamic passing game performances on big-time concepts in the Lamar Jackson-Ravens era.

This feels stable and is a far cry from how things felt after the Ravens' season-opening loss to the Chiefs.

The Texans have enjoyed two excellent rushing performances this season and four dreadful outings. The good games were the only two Joe Mixon started and finished.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Make no mistake: the Texans have some structural issues in their offense, and the front five has not played as well as some of their reputation. Mixon himself may not be an elite running back. However, the dropoff to the current version of Cam Akers as the base-down rusher was only deepening the run game problems created by the ecosystem. After all the injuries, Akers doesn’t have the burst to hit the crease in the zone scheme runs and can’t match the vision Mixon has long brought to the table.

Getting Mixon back brought immediate dividends. Mixon totaled 102 yards on just 13 carries. He ripped off explosive plays in both the run and the pass game. He was excellent on the outside zone runs this offense needs to hit. Mixon totaled 91 yards on nine outside-the-tackle carries, per Next Gen Stats.

We saw the vision for Mixon’s addition to the Texans in Week 1 and got another glimpse of it in this win over the Patriots. Houston largely controlled this contest over an inferior opponent from the jump, but that’s the exact type of game you need a good ground game in. Mixon was ready to step up.

Despite a long absence from a troubling high-ankle sprain, I never wanted to push Mixon too far down my rest-of-season fantasy rankings. It was just too clear how critical his role would be to the 2024 Texans. Week 6 provided yet another reminder of what the veteran back is as the lead back in this ecosystem.

On one last note: don’t overlook Dameon Pierce’s eight carries, who was also back from an injury after not playing since Week 1. A 54-yard, explosive touchdown inflated his final stat line but Pierce is clearly the RB2 on this team and is running with more decisiveness in this scheme after a down 2023 showing. If Mixon has any more setbacks, Pierce would likely be the guy the Texans turn to and it appears he’s more ready for the task this season.

I’m not sure if there’s another player I’ve done more of a 180 on during the last two seasons than Baker Mayfield. At the end of his Panthers tenure in 2022, I felt that Mayfield was done as a starting quarterback in the NFL. Getting close to midway through his second season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I just continue to be wholly impressed with his play.

Few quarterbacks are as dialed into their team’s offense at this moment than Mayfield is. He’s not a flawless passer — there were three interceptions in this Week 6 win over the Saints alone — but even through the mistakes, he just feels so in tune with what this passing offense wants to get done. He hit countless in-rhythm throws to Chris Godwin in this game and continued delivering clutch scrambles when the moment called.

This was the first time all season we saw Mayfield operate with a quality ground game. Starting running back Rachaad White missed this contest, so Bucky Irving continued to push for a bigger role but the bigger surprise was reserve back Sean Tucker ripping off 192 yards from scrimmage with a pair of scores. Tucker was once a high-pedigree prospect who fell out of the draft a year ago because of medical issues, and he showed that talent in Week 6. It certainly felt like a “can’t put the genie back in the bottle” type of game from Tucker, especially for a team that’s been searching for a consistent ground game for years.

Who knows how this backfield will turn out, and it will more than likely become a mess for fantasy purposes. But we saw that a positive rushing game just makes this offense hum even more than it does in one-dimensional efforts.

The Buccaneers offense is well-designed and littered with talent. It’s been one of the best ecosystems to draft into this year in fantasy football. And their quarterback isn’t just some passenger along for the ride. Baker Mayfield is one of the key reasons this scoring unit is functioning at such a high level.

Caleb Williams has continued to get better each and every week, even if that progress was sometimes on the quiet side. Most of the encouraging signs from Williams early in the season were based on how much he handled from an operations standpoint. He’s been tasked with handling signals at the line and sorting out protections from Day 1, which is no small feat for a rookie quarterback. After the first game of the season, you could see Williams gain more confidence as an out-of-structure player and learn the boundaries of what does and doesn’t work in the NFL. It wasn’t always present in the box score and as mentioned, it was quiet progress.

Nothing was muted about his Week 6 performance against Jacksonville, which saw Williams combining the quiet parts of his game with pinpoint passing in high-leverage moments.

The out-of-structure part of Williams’ game has always been the source of discussion around the player, both on the positive and negative ends of his evaluation. Yet, it was his in-rhythm work that shined through in Week 6. According to Next Gen Stats, Williams did his best work on short passes, completing 13 of 14 passes for 111 yards, three touchdowns and nine first downs.

He placed perfect passes in the red zone to a well-covered Keenan Allen by throwing the veteran open. He worked through progressions to get to Cole Kmet on his big plays. He hooked up with Rome Odunze on some big in-breaking routes to move the offense down the field. His lone true miss of the day came on what should have been a deep touchdown to DJ Moore but resulted in an interception. Other than that play, Williams was near-flawless. It was impressive that he played that way while getting all of his main characters involved on offense.

Jacksonville is a pushover defense but the fact that we’re seeing Williams ace the easy tests is an encouraging sign. Doing all this while handling a heavy burden in the operations of the attack has to make you quite bullish on how high he can fly down the road. The Bears will go on bye in Week 7 before returning to the U.S. with more cakewalk matchups in Washington and Arizona. Williams and the Bears could be set to stack some strong weeks on offense.

Hopefully, no one comes out of Sunday night football ready to use Tyrone Tracy Jr.’s 2.9 yards per carry in an argument against the rookie back. Tracy’s low yards per rush figure just doesn’t come close to telling the story of his impact Sunday night.

If you didn’t know before the game on Sunday, the NBC broadcast made sure you knew that Tracy is a converted wide receiver. You saw more evidence of Tracy’s wideout background in Week 6 than his breakout Week 5 game. He caught all six of his targets for 57 yards, including some critical gains that helped move the offense down the field. That was a welcome sign for an offense that needs all the juice it can get in the pass-catching department.

What’s been a consistent and surprising trait through two games without Devin Singletary is Tracy’s high-level skills as a base-down runner.

When Tracy runs, he doesn’t look like a receiver convert. He has good vision to follow blocks when they’re available and gets his pads square to the line of scrimmage. You don’t see a lot of wasted movement in Tracy’s running style, which is so encouraging for a young player with a limited amount of reps at running back.

At some point (likely next week) we will see Singletary back in the fold. But after what we’ve seen from Tracy, there’s just no way that he can be removed from the rotation entirely. Singletary is a veteran who has coach Brian Daboll’s trust based on their history together, but the Giants can’t afford to leave juice on the table.

Tracy has juice. He needs to continue to get playing time for this team.

Few teams have drawn more objections from the fantasy football community than the Atlanta Falcons in recent seasons. At different times this season, it felt like that trend was set to continue. I’d be hard-pressed to take any complaint about any of their players right now too seriously, coming out of Week 6.

The post-Week 1 panic about the passing game feels like a distant memory. We hyper-analyzed the structure of the Falcons offense after that disappointing opener but now, this feels like quite a simple equation. If defenses can get quick pressure on Cousins, they can disrupt this attack; if they can’t, he’s going to cook them. According to Next Gen Stats, Cousins went 13 of 19 for 180 yards on dropbacks of 2.5 seconds against the Panthers. That’s a trend from this season as Cousins has 1,131 passing yards on dropbacks over 2.5 seconds on the year, a top-three mark among quarterbacks.

Teams that can force Cousins off his spot might slow down the aerial attack. That’s important to remember as we break down matchups every week but for the most part, this looks like the unit we expected to see in 2024.

The passing game wasn’t even the biggest story from this win over the Panthers. One week after Cousins dropped back nearly 62 times, the Falcons pummeled Carolina on the ground. The Falcons handed the ball to their running backs 33 times for 200 yards and three touchdowns.

The best offenses are the ones that can sting you in multiple ways; Atlanta looks like one of those units.

Fantasy managers panicking about Bijan Robinson’s output heading into this week can rest easy after he touched the ball 18 times and scored twice. Zac Robinson designed Robinson looks to create splash plays and get into the end zone. Yes, Tyler Allgeier was involved, especially in the effort to salt the game away. That’s fine; Allgeier is good and he’s not going away — you just need to learn to live with that. Robinson is still a fantasy RB1 and has a high ceiling every week when this offense is rolling.

We were all hopeful that the Falcons offense would go from a frustrating ecosystem to one with multiple young players enjoying breakthrough campaigns. We’ve arrived at that destination even if the start of the ride was bumpy. With matchups against the Seahawks, Bucs and Cowboys the next three games, we should see more evidence of that reality on the way.

The Patriots lost to the Texans, Drake Maye turned the ball over and Will Anderson and Danielle Hunter combined for four sacks. If you were against starting the rookie quarterback in this spot, the fear of those three things was part of what gave you nightmares prior to Week 6. If that’s all you’re focusing on coming out of this game against Houston, however, you’re missing the big picture.

Starting Maye was never about salvaging the season or stacking wins. The Patriots wanted him on the field to get the rookie some valuable reps and bring life to an otherwise hopeless offense going nowhere under Jacoby Brissett. In a losing effort, that’s what we saw.

Maye was the Patriots' leading rusher on the day with 36 yards. That’s something to remember for fantasy managers looking for deep quarterback options. He showed plenty of the off-script ability that makes him a guy who can make the play right, even when the original design doesn’t work. No offense needed that more than New England. He also attacked down the field; no team needed more of a vertical dimension than the Patriots. You saw the arm talent that could, in time, make Maye a difference-maker behind center.

It wasn’t all pretty, and it was far from perfect. We knew that was going to be the case. Nothing I saw on Sunday made me think these reps are going to be wasted for Maye or contribute to him being “broken,” or anything of that nature. The Patriots offense became far more interesting with Maye in the fold. There are a lot of young pieces in play here. In time, they can come together to create an effective unit. For now, there were enough encouraging signs amid the chaos to justify the decision to get Maye's development rolling on the field.

Trevor Lawrence was billed as one of the best quarterback prospects of his generation. However, the Jacksonville Jaguars' bottom-line results have not been good enough with him under center. In the wake of both of these realities, we seem to be engaged in constant and circular debates about who is to blame. This exercise has never felt more pointless than it does right now.

Are some of the skill-position players in Jacksonville better in name value than on-field product? Absolutely.

Could the pass protection be better in critical down and distance situations? Of course, it could.

Is the scheme on offense something between stale and outright poor? No question.

To put it kindly, does the overall coaching leave plenty to be desired? That one is beyond obvious.

And yet, through all of that, Lawrence’s individual play still comes up lacking. He makes mistakes, misfires to open receivers and leaves plays on the field. To put an all-too-simple tagline on a complex situation: several years back, he rebounded from a disastrous rookie season but he just hasn’t gotten better since that step forward.

The Jaguars are the ultimate “both things can be true” team but the problem is that multiple issues contribute to the disappointing final result. We’re past the point of pretending Lawrence is secretly an elite quarterback playing in some kind of terrible environment. At the same time, we don’t have to pretend he’s actively bad; he’s just somewhere in the middle. Probably closer to the top of the middle but in the middle of the quarterback crop all the same.

Lawrence is not the problem, far from it. He’s just one of many factors contributing to an epically disappointing output.

You see where we went with unspooling that whole thread … absolutely nowhere. All that matters is that the entire operation in Jacksonville is rotten to the core. It’s been apparent for some time and it’s become an inescapable reality in the majority of their games this year.

The Jaguars are reeling toward a reset at some point in the next few months; it’s just a matter of when ownership wants to begin that process. When we get there, Lawrence will be a part of the future for the Jaguars. It will be up to the next group in charge of this team to clean up the non-Lawrence details to get the best play out of him; mask his flaws and accentuate his strengths. It’s apparent at this point that this current staff has failed in that assignment.

On a Sunday filled with convincing wins and extensive margins of victory, the Cowboys' 47-to-9 loss to the Detroit Lions was the most alarming.

It’s especially troubling when you consider the ultra-competitive 20-19 Cowboys' win over the Lions on December 23 2023. The crew that faced Detroit on Sunday didn’t appear to share any DNA with that team.

The 2024 Cowboys are not a contender.

In that matchup less than a year ago, the Lions were shredded by Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb. The star receiver earned 14 targets in this Week 6 game but only amassed 89 yards and never looked like he was about to take over the game early in the contest. Next Gen Stats notes that the Lions defense generated -31.3 EPA when playing man coverage, which is the second-most by any defense in a game since 2018. Prescott completed just five of 14 passes with two interceptions against man coverage.

A team like Detroit specializing in man coverage is a particularly troubling matchup for the current Cowboys offense. Lamb took just 27 snaps in the slot on Sunday. He’s having to play more at the X-receiver position because their depth is such a nightmare at wide receiver. Jalen Tolbert is a fine complementary receiver but he’s a zone-beater who needs some reps from the slot. KaVonte Turpin has speed but at his size, he can only play in the slot. Neither guy is a man-coverage player. Lamb can win at X-receiver but it does make it easier to assign extra coverage his way on the outside.

No one else in the wide receiver room can win one-on-one matchups consistently.

Dallas has been put in a blender against teams that can play physical coverage on the back end this year and that is a trend we should expect to continue.

With those issues in the pass-catching department and defenses having nothing to fear in the running game, the Cowboys offense only works when their quarterback plays flawless football. We can be honest in saying that Prescott has been anything but perfect to this stage of the season.

You can engage in the same circular discussions of blame with Dak that we just discussed about Trevor Lawrence above, but in the end, it all feels fruitless. Prescott is a better quarterback than Lawrence, but his team has even less margin for error, which makes Prescott’s mistakes feel even more crushing.

The Dallas Cowboys offense isn’t the weakest part of their team; that would be their woeful defense. Yet, the unit is problematic enough that it can’t make up for issues on the other side of the ball. Dallas will have days where it thumps lesser teams but against quality defense and actual contenders, it’ll fall well short of expectations.