How good can Tee Higgins be?

[Whatever]

(04-12-2021, 10:57 PM)KillerGoose Wrote: I never brought up Tee’s 40 time. I said he was plenty fast enough and then gave a few examples of top WRs who ran a 4.5 because you said there weren’t many. That is where the forty came from.

The difference between a 4.54 and 4.48 is absolutely not huge. If it was, John Ross would have been a god. Pure speed, and especially forty times are incredibly overrated. What matters is short area quickness, footwork and route running. You can’t maintain your top speed in and out of breaks. Chad ran a 4.57, but he was elite. Chad had incredible footwork, route running and quickness.

If you want to make a complaint on Tee about him not being very quick then that’s fine. Tee has other attributes that make him valuable, like his strength and route running. However, his speed is plenty fast enough and acting like a .06 second difference in a forty is huge is just silly. Tee has the prototypical frame to play X in this league, and a successful one at that. Saying otherwise because there is some imaginary speed threshold is silly.

I included Pro Day times in my sub 4.5 statement.  You're the one that tried to change the criteria to only guys who ran sub 4.5 at the combine.  Either way you slice it, all the guys you mentioned ran faster than Tee except the guy with the bad knee.

Acceleration is a big part of running the 40, though.  You accelerate out of your breaks.  You also have to maintain that separation out of your breaks by running in a straight line, which is where you need that speed to maintain separation.  There's a reason why NFL GM's take it seriously.  Chad was drafted 20 years ago.  The game has changed a lot since then.

Tee is not a great route runner, yet.  He is good at contested catches, but he wasn't even in the top 100 in Separation per Next Gen Stats.  There's a reason he disappeared when Burrow went down.  Allen can't thread the needle to him when he's covered like Burrow can.  

I heard all last off-season how speed is overrated in all those Auden Tate threads last year.