A year ago, Shawn Siegele penned a 6,000-word deep dive into the Seattle Seahawks’ passing game and what history told us about the upside of Jaxon Smith-Njigba and the risks to D.K. Metcalf and Tyler Lockett. This season’s deep dive features a squad even closer to his heart . . . and even more important for fantasy purposes.
When looking at advance rates from 2024, Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase were the QB1 and WR1 respectively. Tee Higgins gave the Bengals a second WR in the top 10 at the position, and Chase Brown finished as the RB6.
The prices on these players were all very favorable and for a variety of reasons. Cincinnati is never ready for the start of the season, creating angst and disappointment in both the fantasy and reality communities. Burrow was coming off an awful 2023 campaign, also truncated by injury. Chase was threatening holdout. Higgins had struggled to catch the ball for years and had slipped well behind Chase in the pecking order. Meanwhile, Brown, despite a dazzling sleeper profile, was losing buzz to Zack Moss as the season approached.
And yet, when we look back at all of these players hitting together, it came as little surprise and almost seemed inevitable in retrospect. Burrow and Higgins had always been per-play monsters. Chase’s collegiate performance and rookie season suggested a Randy Moss-like ceiling. Even Brown held a workhorse background with top-of-the-position athletic metrics.
The league-winning outcomes weren’t hiding in plain sight, because they weren’t hiding.
The parallels to a 2025 sleeping giant are almost impossible to ignore.
