You would think the NFL could get the simple stuff right. You would be wrong.
Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba won the 2025 NFL Offensive Player of the Year award. The league mailed him his trophy. The trophy says Defensive Player of the Year.
JSN posted a video on Instagram showing the engraving and made it clear he’s tired of the disrespect. “I really want to expose them,” he said. “It’s getting disrespectful, guys.”
He also pointed out that the trophy had a typo where “THE YEAR” was printed without a space, reading “THEYEAR.” So the NFL sent the best offensive player in football a defensive player trophy with a typo on it. That’s the level of attention to detail the most profitable sports league on Earth is operating at.
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy acknowledged the mistake and said the league is shipping a corrected trophy. That’s the right move, but it doesn’t undo what already happened. JSN had to find out about his own award through a trophy that wasn’t even labeled correctly. Then he had to post a video on Instagram to get the league to fix it.
This isn’t even the first time the NFL has made him look like an afterthought. At the NFL Honors ceremony in February, comedian Druski intentionally butchered Smith-Njigba’s name when he announced him as the winner. The crowd laughed. JSN walked across the stage to receive an award he had earned by leading the league in receiving yards, and the host turned it into a comedy bit.
Now the trophy itself is wrong. At some point, this stops being a series of unfortunate accidents and starts being a pattern.
Smith-Njigba is one of the best young players in football. He caught 116 passes for 1,572 yards and 13 touchdowns in 2025 to win Offensive Player of the Year. He’s only 24 years old. He’s the centerpiece of the Seahawks offense. He should be one of the league’s most marketed stars.
Instead, the NFL keeps treating him like an asterisk. The award ceremony was a joke. The trophy is wrong. The replacement trophy is in the mail. JSN had every right to be frustrated, and the fact that he chose to publicly call out the league instead of just quietly waiting for the new trophy tells you exactly how he feels about the situation.
The bigger issue here is what this says about the NFL’s process. How does a multibillion-dollar league not have a quality check before mailing out an award trophy? Somebody had to engrave it. Somebody had to look at it. Somebody had to box it up and ship it. At no point did anyone notice that the trophy said the wrong category and had a typo.
Roger Goodell will brush this off. The league office will apologize again. The corrected trophy will arrive. But the damage is done.
JSN deserved a clean, professional handoff of the biggest award of his young career. The NFL botched it twice. He’s done being quiet about it. Good for him.
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.
