Wide receiver Colbie Young eyes a breakout role in his first season with the Cincinnati Bengals.
There aren’t many receiver rooms in professional football that Colbie Young could walk into right now with a clearer path to becoming a weapon and less pressure to deliver. The Cincinnati Bengals already boast two first-ballot Hall of Fame candidates who are already demanding defensive attention on every snap and the best quarterback in his prime is throwing the ball.
For a rookie receiver trying to find his footing in the NFL, the circumstances could hardly be more favorable.
Young knows it, and he recently addressed Cincinnati’s wide receiver situation during a conversation with FOX 19’s Jeremy Rauch.
“It’s the best drafted situation,” Young said. “People got to focus on Ja’Marr and Tee and give me great opportunities to win with an amazing QB.”
Young’s first assignment at rookie minicamp was learning at the hands of Tee Higgins, the same player he idolized as a teenager in Binghamton, New York, when a chance encounter at a 7-on-7 camp left him starstruck enough to ask for a picture. Higgins was already a Clemson star then, while Young was desperately seeking a Division I offer.
Young’s journey to this point has been far from smooth. One of 15 children, he started his college career at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pennsylvania, catching 24 passes for 472 yards and nine touchdowns in his lone JUCO season before Miami landed him as a transfer in 2022. He spent two seasons with the Hurricanes, catching 79 passes for 930 yards and 10 touchdowns across 22 games, before finishing his college career at Georgia, where suspension and injury limited him to just 13 games.
“Being able to be in different programs and different systems, I learned playbooks very fast on the fly,” Young said. “That’s the reason why I was able to see the field at Georgia and Miami — the way I can learn a playbook and understand and learn from others. I feel like that really translated into this draft, and I’m able to get in there and learn from Tee Higgins and Ja’Marr Chase and all the other guys that are in there.”
While Young has the talent to be a starter in the NFL, it’ll be interesting to see how his fit alongside Chase and Higgins pans out.
“Young is legit — he’s big, and he’s got good hips and really good instincts for route running,” An anonymous NFL executive who evaluated him shared. “He is an outside receiver, though, so there is no one who can play the slot for them unless they put Ja’Marr Chase in there. It’s a helluva value pick. I just don’t know how you play all three at once.”
For every one snap Young played in the slot in college, he played nearly nine out wide. He is a boundary receiver by trade competing with Chase and Higgins for the same real estate. The Bengals will need to be creative in their deployment, likely leveraging Young in red-zone packages, 12-personnel groupings, and specific matchup-based situations where his 6-foot-4 frame creates problems that neither Chase nor Higgins can replicate.
His contested-catch ability and run-after-contact toughness give him a distinctive skill set within that receiving corps. Young is flat-out difficult to bring down after the catch, and will consistently require multiple defenders to stop him. His large hands and high-point skill also make him a legitimate red-zone threat in a room that already has two of them.