In a 38-31 win over the Washington Commanders in Week 8, Brown caught eight passes for 130 yards and two touchdowns. It was the sixth consecutive game that Brown had 125 or more receiving yards in, breaking his tie with Johnson, who had five such games in a row during the 2012 season.
During said 2012 campaign, Johnson set a new single-season receiving record, posting 1,964 yards with the help of quarterback Matthew Stafford. With two months worth of games completed in 2023, Brown now finds himself on pace to break that record as well. Brown is currently averaging 117.4 receiving yards-per-game, and if he keeps up that pace over 17 games, he would finish with between 1,995 and 1,996 receiving yards, breaking Johnson’s record.
There are a few caveats here worth examining.
The first being that it will be extremely difficult for Brown to keep up this current pace, because, well, it’s all-time type stuff. With that said, two months worth of this production isn’t anything to scoff at.
Secondly, when Johnson set the receiving record, the season was only 16 games long. On his current pace, Johnson would finish with 1,878.4 yards in 16 games, just shy of what Johnson did in his record-setting 2012 campaign. At the same time, this is the third regular season with a 17-game schedule, and no other receiver has broken Johnson’s record yet under the new format. Los Angeles Rams receiver Cooper Kupp came the closest in 2021 when he finished with 1,947 receiving yards. Kupp would go on to win Offensive Player of the Year and Super Bowl MVP in
Perhaps the biggest thing that stands in the way of Brown’s season being remembered as an all-timer is that he’s not the only receiver currently trending towards breaking Johnson’s record.
Tyreek Hill of the Miami Dolphins set a preseason goal of becoming the first receiver with 2,000 yards in a single season, and he’s trending towards accomplishing that lofty objective. Hill leads the NFL with 1,014 receiving yards in eight games.
If he keeps up his current pace of 126.8 receiving yards per game, he’ll finish the season with over 2,150 receiving yards. Such a mark would certainly earn Hill the Offensive Player of the Year Award, and may very well make him the first wideout to ever win NFL MVP.
Still, there’s value in controlling what you can control if you’re Brown. In the famous home run chase of 1998, Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals (70) hit more home runs than Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs (66), but both broke the previous single-season record and it was the latter who took home the NL MVP.
Whether it’s the Eagles finishing with a better record than the Dolphins, Hill getting injured or something else, if Brown gets in the ballpark of 2,000 yards receiving, he’ll likely receive his flowers one way or another.
Tim Kelly:
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