Inside the 3 traits that make the Seattle Seahawks' Jaxon Smith-Njigba a nightmare for defenses

Ohio State and Penn State were tied, 17-17, early in the third quarter of the 2021 season when the play call came through: "Henry." Buckeye sophomore wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba figured the ball wouldn't come his way. It never did in practice.

But Smith-Njigba isn't one to waste an opportunity to make a defensive back look silly.

He lined up tight to the left tackle, squeezed into the formation with Penn State senior cornerback Tariq Castro-Fields pressed up against him. Smith-Njigba got free immediately, a little shimmy to his left before darting right. At that point, Smith-Njigba had the defender on his hip – right where he wanted him. Like SGA creating space for a step-back jumper, JSN planted his foot, stopped and left Castro-Fields two yards behind him to finish the route.

Then, suddenly, quarterback C.J. Stroud put the ball in his chest. Castro-Fields probably tackles most wide receivers at that point. Not Smith-Njigba. He sensed Castro-Fields driving from behind and turned the opposite way to break for daylight.

A six-yard hitch turned into a 58-yard gain.

"That's my favorite part of the route, getting open and using all the tools," Smith-Njigba told me in August of 2022.

Smith-Njigba did that repeatedly in high school, becoming a five-star recruit, and in college at Ohio State, becoming a first-round pick. He's doing the same in the NFL, where he will be on the world's biggest stage Sunday in Super Bowl LX against the New England Patriots as arguably the best receiver in the entire league. 

The 23-year-old led the NFL with 1,793 receiving yards this season on the way to first-team All-Pro honors.

His frame doesn't suggest that sort of production should be possible. But dominance comes in many forms.

There are those physically imposing players like Calvin Johnson, someone who overpowers the game. There are burners like Tyreek Hill, who tilts the field with his mere presence. At 6-foot, 197 pounds, Smith-Njigba will never be confused for either game breaker. 

Rodney Webb, who coached Smith-Njigba at Rockwall High School in the suburbs of Dallas, used to make fun of the way Jaxon walked. It's an almost off-balance gait as if "he's got blisters on his feet," Webb says.

"When Jaxon walks into the door, (he) is a fairly unremarkable kid," Webb said.

He's not tall. He's not overly strong. He's not extremely fast (4.53 40-yard dash at Ohio State's Pro Day). So how do you explain what makes Smith-Njigba great?

One Ohio State coach put it to me this way: "Words don't do it justice; you have to see the tape."

A few years ago, we spoke to several people who've had the full Smith-Njigba experience to get a sense of exactly how he embarrasses defensive backs week after week.

"He just has a knack for the game," Smith-Njigba's high school offensive coordinator Trey Brooks said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Early in Smith-Njigba's junior year, Rockwall High School traveled two hours east on I-20 to Longview, Texas. The Lobos in 2018 were atop the state's high school food chain. An East Texas power led by quarterback Haynes King, who was 10th in 2025 Heisman Trophy voting, Longview finished the season at 16-0 in Texas' highest classification.

Rockwall lost by a possession. But Smith-Njigba never lost a route that day, finishing with 13 catches for 289 yards and two touchdowns. It's a performance that flummoxed even his dad.

"I was like, 'Oh my god. Who are you? What is this?'" Maada Smith-Njigba said. 

Maada started training his son at age two. A high school teacher and former college football player, he'd take Jaxon and his older brother, Canaan, and run them through drills after work. A young divorcee, Maada didn't have much money at the time, so the training sessions served a double purpose: Healthy entertainment and a cheap way to exhaust his boys so they'd go home, eat dinner and fall asleep.

That training seemed to work. By age three, Jaxon played up on Canaan's YMCA basketball team. Jaxon could hardly lift the ball above his head, but he'd always harass the opposing team's best player on defense. So Maada had a feeling Jaxon would be an athlete.

But 289 yards against Longview? That felt different.

It would become the norm. Jaxon finished his junior season with 1,828 yards and 20 touchdowns. He bested that as a senior with 2,094 yards and 35 scores, the third most in a single season in Texas high school football history. His 5,414 career receiving yards are also the third-most ever in Texas history.

All of that sounds obvious now. Yeah, the NFL's best wideout dominated his high school competition. But when Smith-Njigba went crazy against Longview, he was rated as a 3-star recruit. And the powers in and around Texas weren't paying him much more attention.

The spring following Jaxon's junior year, then-Texas wide receivers coach Drew Mehringer popped into Webb's office on a recruiting visit. When the subject of JSN popped up, Mehringer preemptively said: "I'm just here to check a box."

Webb couldn't believe it. But schools always seemed caught up in the measurables.

Ohio State wide receivers coach Brian Hartline saw things differently. The Buckeyes made their eval and observed the way Smith-Njigba gained separation on his routes, the way he tracked the football and his production. Hartline offered two weeks before Smith-Njigba went off against Longview.

Oklahoma and Texas A&M didn't offer until months later. It took Texas almost a year. Smith-Njigba finished the cycle as a five-star recruit and the No. 2 receiver prospect in the country.

"I really hate that Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas really just ignored him," Maada said. "That's why I give so much credit to (Ohio State). They were looking for real football players. Now I have to buy flights to Columbus every weekend. I could've been driving down to Austin the same day."

What did Ohio State see? Three intangible traits make Smith-Njigba different from everyone else.

Separation

The couch cushions were lined up in Jami Smith's living room like out-of-bounds paint on a field. Canaan called out the routes and Jaxon ran them. A three-year-old Jaxon would make the catch, but Canaan made him run the play again and again. Jaxon couldn't just catch the ball. He needed to drag his toes in bounds for the play to count. Canaan used to bully Jaxon until he made the play. Jaxon would cry out of frustration at times. But he never stopped. The brothers were relentless.

The training with dad and the imagination at mom's house helped birth an increasingly coordinated child. He was a toddler who had to be strapped to his stroller because he scored so many goals that it ruined his team's soccer games.

"He has a knack for anything that involves controlling movement," Jaxon's mother, Jami Smith, said. "It was never awkward."

Rockwall quarterback Jacob Clark used to marvel at Smith-Njigba's coordination. Clark, who played QB at Missouri State, was a year older than Jaxon. Before moving to Rockwall ahead of his junior season, Clark saw a freshman-age JSN return a punt and turned to his friend and said, "Who the heck is this?"

Clark never played basketball with Jaxon, who skipped his sophomore year of varsity hoops, but he thinks Jaxon shares a lot of similarities to the way a great guard comes off a screen. Smith-Njigba is always setting up a defender to create leverage. He wants to make a defender think he's doing one thing before beating him to the spot he wants to go. Great pass rushers can bend off the edge. Jaxon, with his ability to cut in an instant and maneuver his body at full speed, does much of the same when running his routes.

"He makes cuts and contorts his body better than anyone I've ever seen," Clark said. "He does that better than 95% of the NFL right now."

That's only half of Smith-Njigba separation superpower. The other portion of it happens well before the ball is snapped. He is a maestro of choice routes. Rockwall ran them almost exclusively when he was in high school. Ohio State called many in Ryan Day's system.

The premise is simple: Receivers have route options pre-snap depending on the way a defense is aligned.

For example, if a receiver at Rockwall could beat the safety over the top, they were asked to stick their foot in the ground and run a go. If the receiver couldn't beat the safety, they were told to stick their other foot in the ground and cross the face of the cornerback for an underneath route.

Two options and that's it, right? Not for JSN. 

More than once in his career, Smith-Njigba would upset the defensive back by starting the route like he'd run a go, before sticking it again to cross the defender's face for an easy completion. Rockwall didn't even bother teaching that to 99% of its players, because most of them can't do it.

"The types of questions he'd ask during video weren't normal," Brooks said. "Most kids don't see things the way he sees it. … Sometimes he'd suggest things I couldn't even think about."

Before every snap Smith-Njigba goes through a checklist of sorts. He attempts to figure out if a team is in man or zone. Man is easy. Usually, the defender is right in his face. He will likely be one on one. Zone is a bit more complicated. He is trying to read the defense to see where the holes are likely to be. Then he looks at the defender's leverage to fully form his plan of attack.

"I'm just trying to get all the details," he said.

That's a scary thing for defenders. Smith-Njigba was targeted 112 times as a sophomore at Ohio State and caught 95 passes. That's an 85% success rate, the best in the FBS among any player targeted at least 65 times. Of the 52 FBS players targeted 100 times, Jaxon was the only player with a reception percentage above 80. In fact, his reception percentage is higher than any receiver who's been targeted 100 times in the history of PFF College, which dates to 2014.

"Jaxon is at his best when he has the ability to create," Webb said. "When you give him that -- it's over. You can't cover him."

"You just know he's going to get open," Clark said.

Ball-tracking

Jaxon's brother, Canaan, was a fourth-round Major League Baseball draft selection who played outfield for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He's used to tracking balls hit at high speeds and sometimes hundreds of feet in the air. Jaxon likes to think some of that rubs off on his game. The brothers talk frequently, and Canaan preaches patience and reading the ball in flight to effectively complete the catch

There's probably some of that mixed in with Jaxon's uncanny ability to find a ball in flight. But that doesn't fully explain the catch he made in the Rose Bowl. You know the one. Over his shoulder near the sideline of the end zone, head turned so far that it's horizontal. 

That catch is iconic. It's been viewed millions of times, and Brooks can't help but laugh at that fact. It looked impossible, but he's seen JSN make similar catches on hundreds of occasions in practice.

So where does that ability to track the football come from?

"That's God," Maada said. "It's just like, 'Bro, how?' I'm serious. I don't know."

Hands

Clark used to watch Smith-Njigba catch passes without looking.

"The refs were like, 'I don't think someone at this level can do that,'" Clark said. "So, they'd call it incomplete."

Unlike his god-given tracking ability, Smith-Njigba's hands are a product of work. They aren't big. This isn't a Kawahi Leonard situation where his hands swallow the ball. It took grip strength training -- and lots of it. 

He started young. Maada used to have handshake competitions with his boys. They'd hold on and squeeze to see who'd cower first. They'd work both hands, too. Maada used to make Jaxon hold a football and he'd swipe at it over and over trying to knock it away. Ahead of Jaxon's varsity debut in ninth grade, Brooks remembers watching Smith-Njigba catch passes from the team's ball boys. Then, something odd happened. Smith-Njigba laid on his back and looked behind him. He then proceeded to catch pass after pass with one hand like it was the most normal thing in the world.

"His hands are one of a kind," Clark said.

When he was in college, Smith-Njigba spoke about a new wave of football. He noticed the sport skewing toward creativity, an artistic expansion that allowed skill players to express themselves freely. Smith-Njigba looked at the way the Kansas City Chiefs operate at the height of the Mahomes-Hill-Travis Kelce connection. He said it takes special talents to pull it off, players who can thrive in the open field and consistently get open.

"I feel like that's what my game is," Smith-Njigba said.

It started with those couch cushions. JSN saw football on TV and imagined a similar world in his living room. In high school, Jaxon gravitated to the quarterbacks he played with, developing strong relationships with them, constantly studying with them and asking to play catch. 

Jami said Jaxon has always been that way. Obsessed with football. So much so she never doubted Jaxon when he said he'd play in the NFL. It was conviction matched only by the labor that went toward the goal.

"He's not a very balanced person," Jami said. "He's just so dedicated to football. … It's just been his way. I don't think there's a time he didn't think about defenses."

Inundated with fables of JSN's football mind, I tried to get inside his head: What is he thinking about at the top of a route? So much work goes into getting to that point, where the separation is really about to happen, before the ball-tracking and then the hands. So what is that feeling like, when everything culminates and JSN knows he's about to break free of a defender?

There is a pause for a few seconds. "I don't know," Smith-Njigba says, with a look on his face that tells me we occupy two very different worlds of being, that whatever happen in JSN's moments of greatness are about being, not thinking. 

"Sorry."

Perhaps a story from high school can best attempt to explain the unexplainable.

During a district game against North Mesquite High School, Smith-Njigba ran a route along the sideline but as he cut, his shoe came off. Jaxon caught the ball. Then, ever so casually, he scooped up his shoe in the other hand and scooted out of bounds before any of the several defenders barreling in his direction could touch him. 

"The game moves at a different speed for that person than anyone else," Brooks said. "That's Jaxon right there."