LA Rams TE Tyler Higbee should be among Top 10 TEs in 2021

The LA Rams flirted with putting tight end Tyler Higbee on the map with a month of complete dominance. But after all that production that put up 522 yards of offense, he disappeared into the background once more.  You might think that the arrival of new quarterback Matthew Stafford, a quarterback who loves tall targets and will throw to tight ends as often as receivers, might rekindle interest in Higbee.

But it didn’t.

The latest projections for the 2021 NFL season have Higbee among the bottom half of the NFL’s tight ends, specifically from Pro Football Focus, as the 18th-ranked tight end in the NFL.  And he is the Rams’ primary tight end.  Not only is he ranked so low, but he is ranked below two tight ends who are playing for the New England Patriots (Hunter Henry and Jonnu Smith) and two from the Philadelphia Eagles (Dallas Goedert and Zach Ertz).

Many have not yet connected that playing in Super Bowl LVI is not about playing well, but about playing better than the other teams in the NFL at key positions. Translated? It means that the Rams offensive skill player will need to outperform their track record and show up in a big way.

Higbee is the right player to show up huge in the Rams box score early in the season. He stands 6-foot-6 and weighs 255 pounds. Without sharing time with former teammate TE Gerald Everett, he will likely seem even more playing time as the Rams get comfortable with sharing playing time with second-year tight end Brycen Hopkins and rookie tight end Jacob Harris.

While Higbee did not start out very well for the Rams, he has been catching passes at a remarkable clip over the past three seasons at 70 percent or better. Over the past three seasons, he’s averaged nearly 12 yards per catch, and he has been on a very positive scoring trend.  In 2021, it should all come together for him.

Now, I won’t fall into the same trap as the 2020 offseason. By rights, Higbee had all the makings of a 1000 yard season in 2020, but the number of targets actually plummeted by 50 percent, from 89 to 60, that year. Despite that drop, Higbee still managed to account for 521 yards and five touchdowns. Had he been targeted 100 times in 2020, he would have come up with 73 completions for over 850 yards and eight touchdowns.  That would have positioned him as the third-ranked tight end in the NFL. As it ended up, he was the 17th-ranked tight end.

It’s not about ‘stats’ per see. Unfortunately, winning is about outperforming the other team. That makes the Rams offense vulnerable to players who stay locked to their historic outputs. How so? Well, the Rams need more to win the Super Bowl than they’ve gotten in the recent past. Even when the team got to the big game in 2018, the offense did not play well.

That all means that the Rams will need to rely upon highly compensated players on offense to lead the team much like the Rams rely upon Aaron Donald or Jalen Ramsey. With the defense at risk of regressing after a stellar 2020 season, other players on the team will need to make up the difference. Higbee is in a prime position to be ‘that guy’.  With Stafford throwing the ball, I expect that a Top-10 projection will be very conservative indeed.