Jaxon Smith-Njigba Made the Catch of the Year Look Easy
By Kyle Koster
The San Francisco 49ers made sure that any Seattle Seahawks fan at last night's contest had a less-than-perfect Thanksgiving by thoroughly outplaying the home team from the opening kick to the final whistle. Brock Purdy, who seems fixed, was back to his old self and Christian McCaffrey kept scoring touchdowns at an unreasonable pace as the Niners took any intrigue out of the proceedings with impressive efficiency.
Most of the few bright spots came for the 12th Men and Women came in the third quarter when it appeared the Seahawks were mounting a comeback. Down 14 points and facing a third-and-nine deep in their own territory, Geno Smith and Jaxon Smith-Njigba connected on a highlight reel pass that featured as good of a grab as you'll ever see.
Smith-Njigba being able to corral that with one hand at full speed was insanely impressive and the engagement-thirsty prompt in that tweet is perfectly warranted because it could be the catch of the year to this point. Because it came on the ninth anniversary of Odell Beckham Jr.'s insane finger grab, the NBC broadcast compared the two snags, which was excellent television producing but perhaps a bit of a stretch.
Look, all one-handed grabs have their own story and what Smith-Njigba did was simply fantastic but for my money nowhere near the same interplanetary greatness OBJ displayed back in 2014. It's cool that both catches took place on a Sunday Night Football broadcast but sometimes we go a bit crazy in hyping up the most recent thing we've ever seen.
And that's fine. The OBJ effort was so great that it's perfectly normal to have the catch of a year be significantly less impressive. Both things can be true.