Jaxon Smith-Njigba has taken the NFL by storm, and by the end of the regular season he may be in the league’s record books.
The third-year Seattle Seahawks superstar wide receiver lit up the Tennessee Titans
for eight catches, 167 yards, and a pair of touchdowns in Seattle’s 30-24 road win in Nashville. JSN has already set a new career high in touchdowns (7) and set a new franchise record for receiving yards (1,313), and he needs just 21 receptions to reach 101 and take the top spot for Seahawks single-season receptions.
While the personal and/or franchise records are cool, JSN’s unrelenting dominance has him on course to break an iconic NFL single-season mark.
How far away is Jaxon Smith-Njigba from Calvin Johnson’s single-season yardage record?
As mentioned earlier, Smith-Njigba has 1,313 receiving yards. The NFL record is held by Calvin Johnson, who had a ridiculous 1,964 yards in the 2012 season with the Detroit Lions. Johnson broke Jerry Rice’s previous mark of 1,848 in just 15 games, coming up just shy of 2,000 yards in the regular season finale.
So that you don’t have to do the math yourself, Smith-Njigba needs 652 yards to stand alone in NFL history.
What would JSN need to average to get past Calvin Johnson’s record?
With 11 down and six to go, JSN needs to average about 94 yards per game in order to reach 1,965. JSN has exceeded 94 yards in all but two games this year, and has only failed to clear 90 once.
If the 17-game regular season irks you as a potential asterisk, the average needed over 16 games (which is the regular season length for Megatron and Rice’s respective records) would be about 109 yards per game to not even need Week 18.
What does JSN need to be the NFL’s first 2,000-yard receiver?
Obviously if we’re talking about JSN breaking Megatron’s record, then 2,000 yards is very much a possibility. He’d need about 109 yards per game average over the final six weeks to become JSN 2K. Smith-Njigba is averaging 119 yards right now, so he is on pace to do something the NFL has never seen before. Again, he’s on pace to hit this mark within 16 games, so he doesn’t even need the extra game.
Whether he breaks the record or not, the best receiver in the NFL is a Seattle Seahawk. Let that sink in. Unlike Megatron, whose awesomeness was marred by Detroit being a 4-12 wreck, the Seahawks are 8-3 and would need a terrible collapse to miss the playoffs. JSN has been a huge reason Seattle is one of the most explosive offenses around, and he should be the favorite to win Offensive Player of the Year.
