Jaxon Smith-Njigba is the Seahawks Passing Game

Jaxon Smith-Njigba is very good at football. And the Seahawks offense would be lost without him. Heck, sometimes, they’re lost with him. Through five weeks, JSN was clearly the NFL’s most valuable receiver. With Puka Nacua struggling with a pre-hernia, Smith-Njigba’s main competition for the top of the leaderboards last year hasn’t been around as much, and so Smith-Njigba has gone out and planted himself at or near the top of pretty much every stat we have. Yes, he was first in receiving yards and touchdowns, but it’s not just the raw numbers he’s excelling in. Entering this week, JSN’s 200 DYAR led the league, a full 24 DYAR over second-place CeeDee Lamb. And even against Denver Thursday night, with Seattle’s offense locked up for most of the game, JSN still had 12 catches for 134 yards – nearly 40% of the entire Seahawks offense. One reason JSN is near the top of all the counting stats is because the Seahawks offense runs through him in a way no other team does. Entering this week, 35.2% of all of Seattle’s targets went to Smith-Njigba. Only Garrett Wilson and Amon-Ra St. Brown joined him over 30%. JSN was also your usage leader last year at 35.7%, so this is nothing new, but every other pass catcher on the Seahawks roster is merely supporting talent to JSN. Smith-Njigba has also earned 50.4% of Seattle’s air yards through five weeks, the only player above 50% so far this season. He was also the only player above 50% last season. With the Seattle run game struggling and no other wideout consistently getting open, you shudder to think what the Seahawks’ offense would look like without him. If you took every JSN target out of the Seattle offense, their passing DVOA (prior to Week 6) would drop from 22.5% to -19.7%, and be the worst in the league. Obviously, every offense gets worse if you suddenly take away their very best target, but no one else has splits that stark. Baltimore only goes from 52.7% to 29.9% without Zay Flowers, for example, while the 49ers fall from 70.8% to 49.7% without Mike Evans Smith-Njigba is load-bearing in a way no other wide receiver in the league is. If you want an argument for him to repeat as Offensive Player of the Year over the rushing trio of Jahmyr Gibbs, Kenneth Walker III and Bijan Robinson we looked at last week, well, there it is. But, of course, Smith-Njigba isn’t just a volume merchant. JSN is eighth among qualified receivers with a 36.1% traditional receiving DVOA and second behind Flowers with a 138.2% route DVOA. He demands a lot of targets because he’s efficient with them. For today’s Stats iQ look, let’s dip into yards per route run, where JSN has been one of a quartet of receivers separating themselves from the rest of the league. YPRR is often thought of as a stat more useful for fantasy than actual football; it’s a good way to find players who are succeeding despite not getting a lot of usage, or players who are only producing because of volume. But it ends up serving as a composite of a number of key receiving skills – how often you get open, how important you are to your offense, your catch rate, your YAC ability, and so forth. The highest-ranked players in YPPR tend to be the best receivers in a given season – last year, Puka Nacua was at 3.57 yards per route run, JSN at 3.47, and no one else in the league hit 2.5. It was a two-man race for best receiver in football in 2025. In 2026, JSN has two or three guys keeping him company. Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Zay Flowers, Mike Evans and Drake London do feel like the best quartet of receivers this season. All four are in the top five in route DVOA as well, though CeeDee Lamb slips ahead of London there in part because London has yet to find the end zone – a product both of Bijan Robinson being a pretty good guy to turn to in the red zone and Cooper Rush being a pretty bad guy to turn to anywhere on the field. The gap between these four and the rest of the league is starker in YPRR than anywhere else. We’ve never had four receivers all finish with at least 3.0 yards per route run. We probably won’t by the end of this year, either, but for now, opposing teams can’t really stop any of them. We’ve talked about why JSN is so interesting, but the other three all have something that jumps out in their numbers, too, when you go digging through Stats iQ.

Flowers has the lowest average depth of target of the four by a pretty substantial margin – just 8.6 yards, which is the 14th-lowest among players with at least 100 routes. He’s getting more of his yards through YAC than any of the other top wideouts. He’s third in the league in RACR – Receiver Air Conversion Ratio, measuring how efficiently a receiver concerts air yards into actual receiving yards. The two players ahead of him are Deebo Samuel Sr., who is a gadgety screen guy at heart, and Chris Godwin Jr., who has seen almost 40% of his targets at or behind the line of scrimmage. Flowers may be catching more short passes than the other three, but he’s not a gimmicky screen guy. Flowers has 143 YAC on his short passes this season, which is why he’s hanging up here. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s the least sustainable name of the big four, but at least for now, he’s been a hell of a medium-range threat. Mike Evans does not get open, but catches passes anyway. We have him charted as having gained separation on only 11.4% of his evaluated routes, worst in the league, and yet the 49ers feel very comfortable throwing him the ball. When targeted in tight coverage, Evans has 10 catches for 149 yards and three touchdowns, a league-leading 56 DYAR and a full 82.6 yards over expectation while defenders are draped all over him. Against Seattle alone, the 49ers threw to a well-covered Evans eight times, with Josh Jobe usually doing a decent job sticking with him. Evans went 4-66-1 against tight coverage. At a certain point, you just have to tip your cap to the man with the broken ribs and move on. We said that no team’s passing game revolves around one guy like the Seahawks and JSN, but London has at least an argument. London has run a route on 98.5% of Atlanta’s passing plays; no one else in the league is above 93.5%. London has been the first read on 32 of his 36 targets; only Michael Wilson in Arizona is more frequently first read or bust. JSN does have a few more first-read targets, but that’s just because Seattle has thrown more than Atlanta does; it’s a lot more common for Sam Darnold or Drew Lock to work their way back to JSN than it is for Michael Penix Jr. or Cooper Rush to head back to London. The other thing that can be interesting about yards per route run is looking at the bottom of the list, especially if you change the qualifying threshold to routes, not targets. You need a certain number of targets to qualify for our leaderboards, which makes sense – you don’t want someone to be able to shoot up the leaderboards on a rate stat when they’re only getting a handful of passes thrown their way. Besides, if you’re not getting targets, surely you’re not on the field much, right? Right? Why are you looking at us like that, Minnesota. 0.08 yards per route run for Jauan Jennings. That is less than three inches per route run. Jennings has two catches for nine yards on five targets this season, which are the numbers you expect from some sixth-string wideout who got onto the field due to injury in the fourth quarter of a blowout. Jennings has played 201 offensive snaps this season! He has as many receiving yards as UC Davis legend Lan Larison has for New England this year; Larison has been on the field for three offensive snaps for the Patriots. He has fewer receiving yards than Brandon Coleman; he’s the Commanders’ starting left tackle. Jennings found his market this offseason a little less busy than he thought it would be, settling for a one-year, $8 million prove it deal with Minnesota. So far, very little has been proven. In other words, he is the clear leader in the clubhouse for the Keep Choppin’ Wood team. There’s rumors that he’s being shopped in a trade, and that he may return to San Francisco. At this point, Minnesota might as well keep him.