We’re 10 weeks into the NFL season, and no wide receiver has been better than Ja’Marr Chase, who is putting together the best campaign of his career to date. Chase leads the NFL with 66 receptions. He leads the NFL with 981 receiving yards. And he leads the NFL with 10 touchdown grabs. He is fresh off one of the best games any wide receiver has ever had, having racked up a preposterous 11 catches for 264 yards and three scores in a one-point loss to the division rival Baltimore Ravens, and he’s showing no signs of slowing down any time soon.
Of course, if you’re checking the NFL section on CBSSports.com, you probably don’t need me to rattle off those numbers. You know how good Chase is. What you may not know for certain, though, is what truly makes him such a special and unique player.
And it’s this: Chase is, essentially, the answer to the following question: What if you took an elite vertical receiver like DeAndre Hopkins in his prime and gave him Deebo Samuel’s run-after-catch ability? That’s the kind of player we’re talking about here.
The Relative Athletic Score database has 3,401 wide receivers participating in either the NFL Scouting Combine or their school’s pro day going back to 1987, and Chase grades out as a top 2% athlete among that group of players. Chase is actually only 6-feet tall and 201 pounds, but you would never know it by watching his film. He is so physically imposing, so good in contested-catch situations, so adept at using his body to shield defenders away from the ball. Throw in the fact that he ran the 40-yard dash in 4.34 seconds (at his pro day), jumped 41 inches high, broad-jumped 132 inches and ran the shuttle in 3.99 seconds (all of which rank in the 94th percentile or better for receivers, per Mockdraftable), and you begin to understand why it can be so hard to get him to the ground once he gets the ball in his hands.
The Bengals have put these skills to particularly good use this year on in-breaking routes: slants, digs, posts, crossers.
According to TruMedia, Joe Burrow is 18 of 25 for 447 yards and four touchdowns when targeting Chase on those routes. Among the 212 players leaguewide that have run 100 or more total routes, only Justin Jefferson (457) has more yards on in-breakers. Only Nico Collins and Rashid Shaheed have averaged more yards per route run than Chase’s 6.12 on those routes. And among the 60 players with 15-plus in-breaking targets, Chase ranks first in yards after catch per reception (11.7) by a mile — more than a full yard ahead of the next-closest player (Tyler Johnson, strangely, at 10.4). Among players with double-digit targets on those kinds of routes, only Jameson Williams (an otherworldly 16.3) is ahead of Chase.
He is so sudden and so violent with his movements that it is basically not possible to cover him on short-area routes like slants. Just ask poor Cooper DeJean, who found that out the hard way earlier this season.
He’s smart enough to know what he’s seeing, coverage-wise, and settle into the right area of the field to give Burrow a target and then tough enough to hang on to the ball no matter how many defenders are surrounding him. The Bengals routinely send him to the middle of the field and both he and Burrow have no uneasiness about making that work.
The elite speed (again, he ran a 4.34 in the 40) helps him just absolutely smoke defenders down the field on posts and deep crosses. If you give him a free release off the line, you’re already in trouble. If you stop backpedaling for even a split-second, you’re in trouble. If you jam him and he still manages to stack the route and get his shoulders ahead of yours, you’re done.
He’s also just capable of things that others flat-out cannot do. The combination of speed, vision, tackle-breaking ability and balance are unmatched leaguewide. Again, this is a guy who can make any grab, anywhere on the field, and then just be a running back and make something out of nothing, to the point that you can’t believe he actually scored when it seemed like six different guys should have been able to tackle him before he hit the jets in open space.
All of these skills will be put to one of their greatest tests this season on Sunday night, when the Bengals take on a Los Angeles Chargers team that has allowed the third-fewest receptions (86) and sixth-fewest yards (1,152) to wide receivers so far this year. The Chargers have also allowed only 585 yards on in-breaking routes to players of any position so far this season — a figure that, again, Chase has nearly matched by himself. L.A. isn’t necessarily stocked with stars in the secondary but defensive coordinator Jesse Minter has his unit playing extremely well-organized and highly disciplined on the back end. They will face perhaps their toughest challenges yet as well. Nobody has been able to pass the “shut down Ja’Marr Chase” test to date. It’s doubtful that’ll happen this weekend.