As I cover the sport longer and grow older in my career, I try to be much more judicious in using descriptive words like “elite” when discussing players. It really does matter. However, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Justin Jefferson has been an elite wide receiver since he first stepped onto an NFL field. We’re talking about a player who posted a 76.4% success rate vs. man, cleared 80% success rate vs. zone and hit the 96th percentile in success rate vs. press as a rookie, while taking almost 80% of his snaps outside and 73% on the line as a true X-receiver. It doesn’t get much better than that for a first-year wideout. As his 2024 Reception Perception profile will show, Jefferson has only improved since then and annually reaffirms his place near the very top of wide receiver rankings.Â
Success Rate by Route
Route Percentage
Success Rate vs. Coverage
There are so many NFL coaches doing excellent work in terms of moving their No. 1 wideout around the formation to create favorable matchups. Kevin O’Connell has to be placed right at the top of that list.
Jefferson hasn’t hit a 70% rate of snaps on the line of scrimmage in any season since O’Connell arrived in Minnesota in 2022. He still takes the majority of his snaps at X-receiver, lining up outside on 78.2% of his sampled snaps and on the line for 69%. However, he gets reps from the slot, in motion and in the backfield (3.8%) to get him free from the enormous amount of bracket, cloud and hard double coverage he’d see if he was just a stationary X-receiver.
On that note, Jefferson’s 13.7% double coverage rate is still high but it’s the lowest he’s seen since his second NFL season. He is an extremely small group of players who have pushed north of 20% in a single season (2022). In addition to O’Connell making it difficult to bracket Jefferson based on alignment, I also think it’s clear that the bet Minnesota has made to add Jordan Addison to the equation has paid off as teams at least have to think twice on the matter of true double coverage.
None of that is to say that defenses let Jefferson off easy from a coverage standpoint. In fact, Jefferson was pressed on an outrageous 35.4% of his charted routes in 2024. They really rry to get a physical corner in his face off the line of scrimmage to disrupt him in addition to putting extra coverage over the top. It didn’t make much of a difference. Jefferson checked in with an elite 84.7% success rate vs. press coverage. Not only was that the best among any receiver sampled from last season, it falls at the 98th percentile historically.
Jefferson has hit or exceeded 84% in three straight seasons now. He’s the only wide receiver I’ve charted to accomplish that feat so far; Odell Beckham did it three times between 2014 and 2018 but not consecutively. That is as elite as it gets at the wide receiver position and that alone makes Jefferson a contender for the best wide receiver in the Reception Perception era.
Of course, that’s not the only area where Jefferson is a top-line performer. His 77.6% success rate vs. man coverage marks the fourth-straight year he’s cleared the 90th percentile. He set a career-best mark with an 86.8% success rate vs. zone coverage in 2024, a 94th percentile score.
The guy is one of the best route runners in the NFL and an elite-level separator. Period. End of story.
That said, the story of playing wide receiver doesn’t just end with getting open, even if that’s one of, if not the most important part of being a great player at the position. It just so happens that Jefferson also has perhaps the best hands in the league. He didn’t drop a single pass over his Reception Perception sample. Jefferson saw a contested target on 19.7% of his sampled looks and turned in a ridiculous 93.3% contested catch rate. It’s been a joy to watch the results of what’s obviously detailed hard work that Jefferson has put in the last three years to become an unstoppable threat in tight coverage. Few receivers can be counted on more to snare contested catches in high-leverage situations more than Jefferson.
Justin Jefferson is right at the top of NFL wide receiver rankings right now. He’s just so incredible at all facets of playing the wide receiver position as a mutli-alignment threat who can win at all three levels, get open at an elite rate and possess vice grips for hands regardless of the coverage. Everything about his game, production and resume screams Hall of Fame trajectory right now. J.J. McCarthy is a lucky man to have this player to lean on as he gets used to the league.
