Don’t be mistaken by the white sunglasses shielding Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s eyes from the host of flashing cameras - the bright lights of Super Bowl LX don’t bother him one bit. Frankly, this is the moment he’s been preparing for ever since his mother signed a waiver to let him play flag football at three years old. 

“I envisioned this for a very, very long time,” Smith-Njigba said. “So, it feels like I’ve been here before.”

Smith-Njigba isn’t the only person experiencing déjà vu. His high school coach, Rodney Webb, didn’t jump out of his recliner with his hands clutching his head like the rest of the Seattle Seahawks fans did when Smith-Njigba made a one-handed catch on the sideline of the NFC Championship Game. He’s already seen this movie 10 years ago, and he knows the twist that everyone else is seeing for the first time: Smith-Njigba’s gonna make some catches you’ve never seen on a football field. 

“Some of the plays he’s made, I feel like he could very easily be wearing orange out there with a big Rockwall ‘R’ on his helmet,” Webb said.

Webb first predicted Smith-Njigba would play on Sundays the week before his freshman season when he arrived at Jacket Football Camp. Smith-Njigba wasn’t some physical freak; he didn’t look any different from the other 14 and 15-year-olds. But when the Rockwall coaches put the campers through a mock combine, Webb and offensive coordinator Trey Brooks locked eyes with each other from 30 yards away. It was the first of many times they’d ask, “Did you see what I just saw?”

From a 30,000-foot-view, or maybe a nosebleed seat at Levi’s Stadium, it feels like Smith-Njigba’s life has been a rocket ship on a straight line from that first day at Jacket Football Camp to this Super Bowl. He was a five-star recruit and Texas Gatorade Player of the Year at Rockwall High School. He set Ohio State’s single-season record for receptions (95) and yards (1,606)... on a team with future NFL first-round wide receivers Garrett Wilson and Chris Olave. This year, he led the NFL with 1,793 receiving yards and earned First Team All-Pro at just 23 years old.

But between those historic mountaintops, there are several valleys where Smith-Njigba was overlooked and underappreciated. He never received an offer to the University of Texas despite taking an unofficial visit, and Texas A&M only offered him after his junior season, when he was already committed to Ohio State. There was the hamstring injury that robbed him of his 2022 season at Ohio State, one year after he set a Big Ten record for receiving yards, then caused him to slide to the No. 20-overall pick in the NFL Draft. San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh even said last month, “Coming out of the draft, I’ll put my hand up; I didn’t think he was going to be as good as he is.” Saleh was far from alone. 

Don’t get me wrong: Smith-Njigba’s story is not that of an underdog. We know how silly it sounds to wax poetic about the injustice of him going in the middle of the first round instead of early in the first. The point is that the only person who ever believed with absolute certainty that Smith-Njigba would one day play in the Super Bowl was Smith-Njigba. 

“There was nothing about Jaxon on paper that set him apart from anyone else,” Webb said.

Well, actually, there was one thing. The 5-10-5 or “Pro Agility Drill”, where a player runs 5 yards to a cone, plants, runs 10 yards to the other cone, plants, then sprints back across the line they started at. The drill is meant to measure a player’s change of direction - critical for wide receivers.   

“The one testing metric was the 5-10-5, which was the best I’ve ever seen. Ever,” Webb said. “In 35 years of coaching, I’ve never seen anybody who could get out of the cut and accelerate like he could.”

But college recruiters are also enamored by height and weight. Smith-Njigba was hovering around 6-feet and 190 pounds during his junior season, the most important for recruiting purposes. They’re interested in 40-yard dash times. Smith-Njigba was a solid, but not exceptional with a 4.59. They like track times to measure top-end speed, but Smith-Njigba wasn’t fast enough to run the 100-meter dash or 200-meter dash at Rockwall, instead competing in hurdles. 

Smith-Njigba’s work ethic could not be measured or, at least, quantified on a piece of paper.  

“If you’re not going to recruit this kid, you’ll never need to come back to this school,” Webb said. “Because if he can’t play for you, I’ll never coach a kid that can play for you.” 

Starting at just eight years old, Smith-Njigba would wake up early each morning and run “Walmart Hill” with his father, Maada, and older brother Canaan, who was selected in the fourth round of the 2017 MLB Draft by the New York Yankees. For the rest of his life, he’s attacked every rep in the weight room and the practice field like it was that steep hill across from Walmart. 

“If there’s any kid that could’ve acted like he’s got it all figured out, it would’ve been him,” said Brooks, his high school offensive coordinator. "But he never acted that way. It sounds like coach talk, but he really impacted groups for years after him, because all those younger receivers would watch him work.”

Maybe this attitude is why whenever Webb goes out to The Square in downtown Rockwall, he sees a bunch of people in Seahawks regalia, or Ohio State threads a couple of years prior. Or, who are we kidding, it’s probably because he had 2,162 receiving yards and 35 touchdowns as a senior at Rockwall High School in 2019. 

Those at The Square still speak in awe of the night Smith-Njigba had 197 yards and five touchdowns in the first half of a playoff game against Allen. He suffered a hip pointer on the first drive of the third quarter, but still managed 252 yards and six total touchdowns in a classic 60-59 win. The performance was so dominant that he earned his fifth star on Dave Campbell’s in the middle of the game.

That night at AT&T Stadium foreshadowed the rest of Smith-Njigba’s career, a hint that he’d one day break Rose Bowl records with 15 catches and 347 yards at Ohio State, or haul in 10 passes for 153 yards in the NFC Championship Game.  

“Ironically, it was true at Ohio State, and it’s been true in Seattle - his biggest moments are typically on the biggest stage,” Webb said. 

So why should the biggest stage of them all be any different?