Fantasy Football Injury Impact: Jayden Higgins Out for Season

Let’s take a look at the latest fantasy football injury updates from around the NFL. To stay up to date on all of the latest fantasy football news, NFL injury updates, and rumors, be sure to follow @FantasyProsNFL on Twitter and bookmark the FantasyPros NFL Player News page. Let’s dive into the season-ending injury to Texans wide receiver Jayden Higgins and its fantasy football impact.

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Fantasy Football Updates: Jayden Higgins Injury Impact

Derek Brown and Pat Fitzmaurice share the fantasy football impact of Jayden Higgins‘ injury on a few fantasy-relevant players. First, here’s the news on the unfortunate injury.

Jayden Higgins (knee) suffers torn ACL, out for 2026

Jayden Higgins (knee) suffered a torn ACL in practice on Tuesday. He is now out for the 2026 NFL season.

Fantasy Impact

Higgins was having a great training camp by all reports, so this is awful news for those who invested in him for fantasy. But even moreso for the player, who was looking to have a second year breakout, and now must turn his attention to the 2027 season. Tank Dell and Jaylin Noel will likely see the largest uptick in work in his absence with Xavier Hutchinson still coming in as more of a blocking receiver.
– Garrett Ball

Fantasy Football Impact

Over the last two years, CJ Stroud has been unable to match the splendor of his 2023 rookie season. Shoddy offensive line play was undoubtedly part of the problem in 2024. The Texans’ O-line outperformed expectations in 2025, but Stroud was a league-average starter at best. As a rookie, Stroud threw for 4,108 yards and 23 touchdowns, with only five interceptions. He averaged 273.2 passing yards per game and 8.2 yards per pass attempt. In 31 starts over the last two seasons, Stroud has averaged 218.3 passing yards per game and 7.1 yards per attempt. His yearly finishes in fantasy points per game among QBs with at least nine starts: QB7, QB26, QB20. The Texans have worked on upgrading Stroud’s offensive line, but Houston’s pass-catching corps took a hit in mid-August with the loss of promising second-year WR Jayden Higgins to a torn ACL. With Houston having one of the NFL’s top defenses, Stroud probably won’t be presented with a lot of pass-happy game scripts. Consider Stroud a low-end QB2 or high-end QB3 for fantasy.
– Pat Fitzmaurice

With Jayden Higgins out for the year with a torn ACL, one of the players who could be asked to step up and into a bigger role in 2026 is Jaylin Noel. Noel played 67.2% of his snaps from the slot last year, so the worry is how much he’ll be on the field this season, but Houston was fifth in usage of 11 personnel (65.9%) so he could see a near full-time workload. That’s also not accounting for the possibility that he could play more on the perimeter in 2026 (not a ton, but maybe 40%). Last year, in the four games (yes, it’s a small sample), Noel played at least 33% of the snaps (76 routes); he had insane per-route efficiency with a 25% target-per-route run rate, 2.46 yards per route run, and 0.132 first downs per route run (per Fantasy Points Data). Am I expecting him to put up those type of numbers on a per-route basis over the length of a full season? Hell no, but this is just to illustrate the talent that Noel has when he actually saw the field with regularity last year. Noel is a nice late-round dart that could hit in the big way in 2026.
– Derek Brown

Dalton Schultz had 82 catches for 777 yards and three touchdowns in 2025 to finish TE11 in half-point PPR fantasy scoring. The modest TD total limited his fantasy impact, but Schultz finished tied with Jake Ferguson for third among tight ends in receptions behind only Trey McBride and Kyle Pitts. Schultz finished sixth among TEs in receiving yards. With the Texans’ good young corps, it initially seemed as if Schultz might be hard-pressed to match the career-high 106 targets he saw last season. But with Jayden Higgins, Houston’s No. 2 receiver, tearing his ACL in mid-August, Schultz figures to once again be an important cog in the Texans’ passing game. Consider Schultz a midrange TE2 for fantasy.
– Pat Fitzmaurice