Yahoo Sports Daily hosts Caroline Fenton and Jason Fitz are joined by Sumer Sports host Lindsay Rhodes to discuss whether Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba deserves to become the highest-paid receiver in the NFL. Watch the full episode of Yahoo Sports Daily on YouTube or YahooSports.TV.
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Video Transcript
This is data from Lindsay Rhodes of Sumer Sports that shows that JSN is playing faster than his combine-measured 40 time, and that he’s getting faster along the way.
Just when you thought the best couldn’t get better, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
That’s what he’s doing.
Lindsay joins us right now.
You believe JSN deserves to be the highest-paid wide receiver in the NFL.
How does this data sort of support that case?
well, I mean, gosh, by the way, there are quite a few people that fall into that category of playing faster than their combine speed, which is a separate conversation about, like, play speed versus, track speed.
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But, I think the fact that he seems to be getting better I mean, there’s just so many different data points that we could point to that would suggest that he should be the highest-paid wide receiver, when they start having that conversation about that.
eh, and you can just start with the fact that he’s up next right?
Like, I mean, that’s just how it works in the NFL.
If you are in that upper tier, you go to the top over somebody else, and he is definitely in that upper tier.
there were three wide receivers who scored tens for us this season.
we score every play for every player of every game, and then we, we bust out, like, trait grades for them.
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We bust out overall grades for them.
and, and he and Puka and Ja’Marr Chase had historically special seasons, this season, 99th percentile compared to all wide receivers since 2016.
And, he also had a yards per route run of 361, which, if you think about it, we’re talking about the number of yards that he is likely to, create on a football field every time he runs a route.
That’s not every catch.
That’s all of the routes in which he wasn’t targeted, breaking up into an average of 3.6 yards every time he literally runs a route.
I mean, he was number one in target share.
They come- went to him 36% of the time.
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Like, there’s just, in terms of the metrics that are really sticky for us in the wide receiver space, and sticky meaning, like, predictive, like, if you do this one year, you are likely to do it again, and again, and again.
He just, knocked the ball out of the ballpark- Awesome in all of those categories.
So I think it’s safe to assume that the season we saw from him this year was, in many ways, a coming-out party, but also a, like, not an outlier.
I think that we should expect to see something like that from him from here on out.