The best fucking receiver who won’t make the Hall of Fame

All of the members of our Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players have brought value to their teams in an underestimated way – it is a kind of entrenchment requirement, after all. But few are downright forgotten in the way former Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Jimmy Smith has been since his retirement in 2006. Entering playing in one of the NFL’s smallest markets during his career and leading a rough ride Substance abuse battle afterwards – which probably prevented him from the kind of second act in broadcasting enjoyed by many of his receiving contemporaries – most fans don’t remember how great Smith was at his peak.

Which is a shame because he was secretly one of the greatest assisters in NFL history.

From 1996 to 2002, Smith was perhaps the best receiver in football. During this period, he placed second (behind Marvin Harrison) in total catches, first in receiving yards and seventh in touchdown receptions. According to the True Receiving Yards metric I created with Chase Stuart of FootballPerspective.com – which adjusts receiver statistics for era, schedule duration and team pass volume – Harrison alone (8,311 TRY) was more productive during this period than Smith (8,271). Harrison is in the Hall of Fame, along with a number of other Smith peers: Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, Isaac Bruce, Tim Brown, Cris Carter and, of course, Jerry Rice. But the Township of Smith did not do much more than draw up the preliminary lists of candidates.

We previously wrote that the Professional Football Hall of Fame has a receiver problem. The importance of the position – and its statistical benchmarks – have evolved considerably over time, especially as the passing game has taken over modern sport since the 1990s, but the Hall selection committee had struggling to apply a scalable standard to candidates’ resumes. For example, it might be tempting to wipe out Smith’s lifespan statistics – 862 receptions, 12,287 yards, 67 TD catches – as a product of the modern hobby era. But Smith’s career was already halfway through when the 1999 St. Louis Rams ‘Greatest Show on Turf’ began to revolutionize the modern passing game; he hung up his crampons for two good seasons before the 2007 New England Patriots further accelerated this trend. Overall, Smith – who retired as the seventh most prolific catcher of all time – was at the forefront of the productive receivers who would follow, not the other way around.

Elected to the I-AA Jackson State division by the Dallas Cowboys in the second round of the 1992 draft, Smith faced medical setbacks – a broken leg, appendectomy – even as the Cowboys dynasty flourished. In the fall of 1994, he was eliminated by Dallas and also by the Philadelphia Eagles, which had led to a year without football. But the expansion of the Jaguars paved the way for Smith’s career. He signed for 1995 and spent the season climbing the ranks of the new team. In 1996 Smith won a starter role (alongside ex-Browns WR Keenan McCardell) and exploded on the scene with 1,244 yards, while the Jags stunned the NFL with a trip to the championship game. ‘AFC. In this season’s signature victory – a knockout game upset by the much-favored Denver Broncos – Smith had 71 yards and scored the game winning touchdown.

This set off a series of peak seasons for Smith that few other enlargers can match. According to the approximate value (AV) of Pro-Football-Reference.com, Smith had 74 AV in his best streak of five consecutive seasons (1997-2001), which is tied with Lance Alworth, Antonio Brown and Julio Jones for fifth – best since 1960. And the best set of seven consecutive seasons of Smith (1996 to 2002) earned him the exclusive possession of seventh place since 1960, behind only Rice, Harrison, Reggie Wayne, Michael Irvin, Alworth and Moss.

McCardell and Smith – nicknamed “Thunder and Lightning” – were a historically powerful duo at the receiver. In fact, McCardell could make his own HoPDGP case. But that makes it all the more impressive that Smith has remained so hyper-productive in front of another Pro Bowl level target. As Doug Drinen of Pro-Football-Reference cleverly pointed out, soccer receivers are teammates … but they are also competitors, competing for the attention of the quarterback in addition to fighting the defenders. So it’s telling that Smith never finished behind McCardell in TRY (either in total or per game) in one of their six seasons together. This is also a big reason why Smith finished fourth among players who started their careers in 1950 or later – behind only Rice, Harrison and Owens – based on their TRY face to face against their teammates during their career (after adjustment for the effects of aging). At its peak, Smith was a receiving machine, easily the most important part of a Jaguars team that won the seventh games of the 1996 NFL in retirement from Smith after the 2005 season. (In fact, Smith remains to date the leader of the Jags des Jags franchise.)

For all of his success as a player, Smith has fought more than his share of battles with personal demons over the years. At the end of his career, he was suspended under the NFL addiction policy; after his retirement, he went through even more cycles of rehabilitation, sobriety and relapse, even going as far as serving a prison sentence in 2013. Opening to Gene Frenette of Jacksonville.com in 2016, Smith admitted that its fight against drug addiction is a constant obstacle.

″[Being sober] is not a victory because it is a lifelong battle, “Smith told Frenette. “I am human. I am having difficulties. Help me to hold myself accountable. I am afraid like hell. Now the real work begins.”

Smith was inducted into the Jaguars’ ring of honor – known as Jaguar Pride – in 2016, and participated in various team events over the years that followed. The next step for Smith could be Canton, although he seems to have been swept by the wave of modern seers who have inflated the statistical requirements for entry into the Hall of Fame.

According to measures adjusted at the time such as TRY and AV, Smith is part of the conversation of the big receivers of all time. And if nothing else, the Hall of Pretty Damn Good aims to prevent great players like him from falling through the cracks of history.