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Jeremiah Smith Is the Heisman Favorite. He's Not Even Leading the Country in Receiving.
By MVPeav · @MVPeav ·
Jeremiah Smith is going to win the Heisman Trophy. That's been the assumption for weeks, and nothing about his season has given anyone a reason to back out of it. He's the most physically ridiculous receiver college football has seen in a long time, he plays for Ohio State, and he's put up the kind of numbers that make a voter's job easy.
So let me ask a slightly annoying question: why isn't he leading the country in receiving?
He isn't. The guy leading the country in receiving yards and receiving touchdowns is a 5-10, 172-pound true freshman at Oregon State who was playing high school ball in Baltimore a year ago and says he didn't have a single offer as a receiver. And while we're at it, there are two more guys on 2-4 teams putting up numbers that would have them on every watch list in America if they played for somebody good.
This isn't a "Smith is overrated" article. He's great, and he's earned the favorite tag. It's a "the Heisman conversation is way too small" article. Let's do the numbers.
The favorite has earned it
Start with the man himself. Through seven games Smith has 52 catches for 984 yards and 12 touchdowns. He went for 217 yards and four scores against Illinois, which tied Ohio State's single-game record for touchdown catches, then followed it with 206 at Iowa.
The best game he's played all year when accounting for opposing defense came in a loss. At Texas in Week 2, against a defense that ranks fifth in ESPN's SP+, Smith caught 8 balls for 164 yards. In its other games, Texas has held the opponent's top receiver to about 51 yards on average. Smith tripled it.
The last two weeks have been quieter tho. Some of that is volume: after 14 to 16 targets in three of his first five games, he's seen just five or six in each of the last two. He had 4 catches for 93 yards against Maryland, then 4 for 68 at Indiana. The Indiana one still had a moment: a 38-yard touchdown on 4th-and-1 that was his 39th career touchdown catch, tying Braylon Edwards' Big Ten record.
And now there's a real headwind. Julian Sayin is out for several weeks with an injured right arm, which means the best receiver in the country is about to catch passes from a backup right as the schedule gets serious. Oregon comes to Columbus on November 7. Michigan is November 28.
Meet the kid who's actually leading the country
Jesse Legree didn't play receiver until his senior year of high school. He was a defensive back at St. Frances Academy, flipped to wideout, and says he had no offers at the position. Oregon State hired JaMarcus Shephard, Legree committed, and here we are.
Seven games in, Legree has 46 catches for 1,040 yards and 14 touchdowns. He's hit 100 yards in all seven games, an Oregon State record for consecutive 100-yard games. That number deserves to be said slowly: 7 for 7. Smith is 4 for 7.
The signature game was Week 2 against Texas Tech, a defense ranked 13th in SP+. Legree caught 8 balls for 240 yards and two touchdowns. That's the second-most receiving yards in an Oregon State game ever, behind only Mike Hass's 293. Then last Saturday he took one 90 yards to the house against Washington State, the Beavers' first 90-yard catch since 2003.
He also talks like a guy who knows exactly what he is. "When I go to catch a ball, they talk about 50/50," Legree said. "I know it's 100/0 going to come down with me." His own offensive coordinator, Mitch Dahlen, says he doesn't act like a freshman.
To be fair to the voters, Legree isn't totally invisible anymore. He made the AP's midseason All-America first team, and he's fifth on the Heisman oddsboards, the only non-quarterback behind Smith. But he's being treated like a fun story, not a real candidate. That's the part I don't get.
Legree vs. Smith, side by side
Put the two lines next to each other and it's not close in the categories that usually decide this stuff.
Legree has more yards, more touchdowns, and a higher yards-per-game average (148.6 to 140.6). He's more efficient too. Using targets from the play-by-play, Legree is averaging 17.3 yards every time the ball goes his way. Smith is at 14.3, which is elite. Legree's number is absurd.
And he's doing it on way fewer looks. Oregon State has thrown 287 passes this year, more than any team in this piece, but only about one in five goes to Legree (21 to 23%, depending on whose target count you use). Smith gets about a third of Ohio State's throws. Give Smith's target share to Legree and he'd have seen roughly 30 more balls come his way.
Smith has the edge in catches (52 to 46) and a better team record (6-1 to 5-2). Those aren't nothing. But if you covered up the helmets and handed a voter these two lines, I'm pretty sure which one they'd circle.
One more thing worth saying: Legree is doing this as a true freshman. No freshman receiver has ever won the Heisman.
Measured against the receivers who actually won it
Five receivers have won the Heisman: Johnny Rodgers (1972), Tim Brown (1987), Desmond Howard (1991), DeVonta Smith (2020) and Travis Hunter (2024). So I went back through their game logs and pulled what each of them had after their team's first seven games of the winning season.
The best of the group was DeVonta Smith, who had 65 catches for 903 yards and 10 touchdowns through seven games on his way to 1,856 yards and a national title. Legree and Jeremiah Smith are both ahead of that, and Legree's 1,040 yards is the most of anyone on the list.
Now the honest caveats. Rodgers, Brown and Howard won in different eras, and a big chunk of their cases came on returns. Brown had three punt-return touchdowns, Howard had his famous one against Ohio State. Hunter won playing both ways and picked off four passes. Howard also had 15 touchdowns through seven games, so the TD number isn't a clean sweep.
But on pure receiving production at this point in the season, Legree is ahead of every receiver who has ever won the thing. Carry his per-game numbers over a 12-game regular season and he lands around 1,783 yards and 24 touchdowns. DeVonta finished with 1,856 and 23, and that took 13 games including the playoff.
Who they did it against
This is where Smith's people get their best argument, and they should make it. Smith's schedule has been tougher.
He's faced three defenses in the SP+ top 13: Texas (5th), Iowa (13th) and Indiana (2nd). He went for 164, 206 and 68 in those games. Legree's toughest test was Texas Tech, and the rest of his FBS schedule is mostly soft: Colorado State (132nd), UTEP (131st), San Diego State (99th), Washington State (89th) and Houston (50th).
So I tried to put both guys on the same scale. For every FBS game, I compared what they did to what that defense allowed the other team's top receiver in the other games on their schedule. It's a simple way to ask "how much more than a normal No. 1 receiver did you get?"
The answer: Smith has averaged 69 yards more than a defense's usual top receiver. Legree has averaged 68 more. Dead even.
Smith's résumé against good defenses is better. Legree's production against everybody is better. Per game, they're beating their opponents by the exact same margin. That's a dead heat race to the finish.
The guys nobody's even listing
Now for the two receivers who aren't on a single Heisman list or oddsboard that I could find.
KJ Duff is a 6-6 junior at Rutgers who had 1,084 yards last year, nearly left in the portal, and came back anyway. "I was ready to leave," he said, before deciding his "first intention is I want to win." The winning hasn't happened much. Rutgers is 2-4 and lost its opener at home to UMass, 37-21. Duff had 9 catches, 196 yards and 3 touchdowns in that game anyway.
He's at 42 catches for 741 yards and 9 touchdowns in six games, and here's what makes him fun to compare: Rutgers and Ohio State played two of the same defenses. Against Indiana, the No. 2 defense in SP+, Duff had 78 yards and Smith had 68. Against Maryland, Duff went for 9 catches, 113 yards and 2 touchdowns in a 37-30 road win. Smith had 4 for 93 and 2 scores. Same defenses, same WR#1 status and the guy on the 2-4 team outgained the Heisman favorite both times.
Umari Hatcher's story might be even better. He's a sixth-year senior at Syracuse whose 2025 ended with an injury. He entered the portal, then came back. Syracuse is 2-4 and 0-4 in the ACC, and the quarterback room is a disaster: the top two quarterbacks are both out, so Hatcher is catching passes from the third-stringer, Malachi Nelson.
He doesn't care. He just went for 13 catches and 224 yards against Louisville, both career highs, and he's third in the country with 784 receiving yards in six games. "It really doesn't matter who the quarterback is," Hatcher said after that one. "I got to make plays for each one of those guys."
I'll be straight about where these two sit. Their efficiency isn't at Legree or Smith's level: Duff averages 10.6 yards per target and Hatcher 11.4. Their case is different. Duff is targeted on nearly two of every five Rutgers passes and Hatcher on about 30% of Syracuse's, the heaviest workloads of anyone in this piece. Duff accounts for 46% of Rutgers' receiving yards and Hatcher 45% of Syracuse's, on teams where every defense knows exactly where the ball is going. That's not a Heisman case today. It's a case for being in the conversation, which they currently are not.
Bottom line
Jeremiah Smith is the favorite and he deserves to be. He's done it against the best defenses, he's got the Big Ten record chase, and he'll have Oregon and Michigan left to close the deal, even with a backup quarterback.
But "deserves to be the favorite" and "the only receiver worth talking about" are not the same thing. Jesse Legree has more yards, more touchdowns, a 100-yard game every single week and a better seven-game start than any receiver who has ever won the Heisman. If he were wearing scarlet and gray, we'd be talking about him every Saturday.
The history isn't on his side. The last Heisman winner from outside the power conferences was Ty Detmer at BYU in 1990, and the closest anyone has come lately was Ashton Jeanty finishing second for Boise State in 2024. Which is fitting, because Oregon State goes to Boise on November 14. That's Legree's Heisman moment, and I'll be watching it.
As for Duff and Hatcher, they're not winning the trophy. But if you're making a list of the best players stuck on bad teams this year, they belong at the top of it.