Jaxon Smith-Njigba Gets a Corrected NFL Offensive Player of the Year Trophy After Typo Embarrassment
Jaxon Smith-Njigba has a lot to celebrate this week. He is getting his Super Bowl LX ring on Thursday night. He is also getting his Offensive Player of the Year trophy, again, because the first one the NFL handed him was printed with multiple typos.
The Seahawks star receiver took to social media this week to confirm the league had sent him a new trophy. The original, presented at NFL Honors back in February, had spelling errors on the engraved plaque. The league quietly corrected it and sent a fresh version. Smith-Njigba was a good sport about the whole thing and posted a photo of the new hardware.
This is the kind of small embarrassment that the NFL would rather not talk about. The league spends millions of dollars staging its annual awards ceremony. Trophies are not a place to cut corners. Getting the name and stats wrong on a major individual award is the kind of thing a junior intern would catch if anyone was actually proofreading.
For Smith-Njigba, none of that matters. The 25-year-old just had the season of his life. He led the league in receiving yards, helped the Seahawks win Super Bowl LX, and walked away with the most prestigious individual offensive award in football. A typo on the first trophy does not change any of that.
The Seahawks will give Smith-Njigba and his teammates their Super Bowl rings during a ceremony Thursday evening. Ring nights are some of the most enjoyable evenings in any pro sport. Players who spent six months grinding through training camp, 17 regular-season games, and a four-game playoff run get a single night to celebrate together before the next season starts to swallow them whole.
The Seahawks have not had a ring night since the franchise won Super Bowl XLVIII at the end of the 2013 season. That was 12 years ago. The cast on this current Seattle roster is entirely different. Russell Wilson is long gone. Bobby Wagner is retired. Even Pete Carroll, the architect of the previous title, has been out of town for two seasons.
What Seattle has built instead is a Smith-Njigba era. He was the league’s best receiver in his third NFL season. He went over 1,800 receiving yards, scored 14 touchdowns, and was the engine of an offense that finally clicked under second-year head coach Mike Macdonald.
Smith-Njigba is also entering the most important contract conversation of his career. He has two years left on his rookie deal. The Seahawks will want to extend him before he plays out the option year. Receivers coming off OPOY seasons command top of the market. Justin Jefferson is at $35 million per year. CeeDee Lamb is at $34 million. Smith-Njigba just outproduced both of them.
That math is going to get complicated quickly. Smith-Njigba is younger than both of those guys. He has the Super Bowl ring. He has the OPOY trophy, both of them. Seattle is going to have to pay him at the top of the receiver market this offseason or risk going into 2026 with their best player thinking about free agency.
For now, the focus is on Thursday night. The ring will go on. The trophy, the real one this time, will sit on the mantle. Then it will be back to work for a Seahawks team that will be every bit as hunted as they were the hunters last fall.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
