Jeremiah Smith posted his second consecutive 200-plus yard performance on Saturday afternoon against Iowa to help lead Ohio State to a 31-14 road win. But where does he rank among the all-time greats? What separates the legends is the ability to produce even when the other team knows you are going to get the football.
In his first two years, you could argue that Smith benefited from being part of an elite receiving corps that forced opponents to pick their poison. This year, he is the engine and is carrying the offense through five games. Smith has 44 catches for 823 receiving yards and nine touchdowns through five games.
The next-best receiver for Ohio State has been Devin McCuin, with 17 catches for 245 yards and two touchdowns. Every defense knows that Julian Sayin wants to throw the ball to No. 4, and no one -- even stout defenses like Texas and Iowa -- has been able to force Sayin to look anywhere else. That's the kind of dominance reserved for the game's hyper elite, and it puts Smith in rare air among the best receivers college football has seen in recent memory.
We put together our top 10 receivers of the last 26 years in college football, where productivity matters, but there is a considerable amount of eye-test involved. The people's Heisman winner in 2003, Larry Fitzgerald, was one of the most stunning combinations of size, speed, hands and body control the game's ever seen. His Hall-of-Fame NFL career is what most fans remember now, but in college Fitzgerald was doing outrageous things on a near-weekly basis at Pittsburgh -- which wasn't exactly a dominant football team.
Every game, every opponent knew the ball was going to go to No. 1, and it didn't matter one bit. No one on this list played in a less receiver-friendly situation than Johnson, but one could argue that it only grew his legend. Johnson was dominant from the moment he stepped onto the field in Atlanta.
He did that in spite of playing in what was a run-heavy offense with a quarterback who never completed more than 50% of his passes in Johnson's three years, but the inaccuracy from the quarterback position also helped Johnson show off his insane catch radius and athleticism that made Megatron an all-time great at the NFL level as well. If he continues on the pace he's on the rest of this season, he's going to have a strong argument for this list's top spot. What makes Smith stand out is his dominance from the moment he set foot on campus at Ohio State.
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