Jerry Jeudy didn’t realize what he was in for. When the Browns’ receiver took the field at Mile High on Monday night in Week 13, his first time playing against his former team, he thought he could treat it like any other game.
“The world probably makes it like a revenge game for me,” he told me this summer. “But honestly, I came in with the same mindset I come into every other game with.”
He also didn’t know the game would turn into a bit of a circus. He didn’t plan ahead of time to spend the night stomping around the field like a WWE villain, putting his hand up to his ear and gesturing to the crowd.
“It was just in the moment,” he said, a reaction to the atmosphere forming around him. It started with the Browns’ first offensive play of the game, when he got loose for a 44-yard catch-and-run on a pass over the middle and an escape to the sideline.
“After the first catch, I heard some boos in the crowd, which I didn’t really expect,” he recalled. “So after that, it just kinda hyped me up and gave me a little energy to really dominate and put on a show.”
And he definitely didn’t know his exploits that evening would result in his winning The MMQB’s official Octopus of the Year Award, an honor he didn’t know existed until several months later. But that’s just proof you never know what can happen when you line up on an NFL field.
Welcome to The MMQB’s sixth annual Octopus of the Year Awards. As always, we’ll back up a bit for anyone new here.
In 2019, I introduced the octopus, my term for when a player scores a touchdown and the ensuing two-point conversion on the same drive. In every offseason since, I have shared new fun facts and chronicled the way my brainchild has spread throughout the land, as it’s become a Super Bowl prop bet, started getting name-checked on RedZone and various game broadcasts, and last year got an official page at Pro Football Reference.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating how far it has spread, I was alerted in June when Malik Stanley pulled off the feat for the Munich Ravens in the European League of Football.
Here in the States, I’ve spoken to Cam Akers (2021), Mark Andrews (’22), Jalen Hurts (’23) and Tyler Lockett (’24) to officially inform them of their awards.
Jeudy had one of nine across the NFL this season, and there were a few other good candidates.
When the Packers and Vikings met in Week 4, the two franchises were tied for the most octopi in league history, with 11. Tucker Kraft gave Green Bay its 12th.
In Week 12, Chuba Hubbard’s eight points tied a Panthers-Chiefs game with under two minutes left, though Kansas City pulled out the win on the next drive.
In Week 15, Davante Adams became the third player with three career octopi, joining Randy Moss (three), behind only all-time Octopus King Todd Gurley (four).
We also saw octopi on game-winning touchdown runs by Saquon Barkley and Rhamondre Stevenson, though in both cases the two-point conversions weren’t really factors.
And we typically stick to the NFL, but my phone did blow up when Arizona State running back (and now Giants rookie) Cam Skattebo had a game-tying octopus with five minutes left in the Peach Bowl. Texas went on to win in double overtime and advance to the national semifinals, or else I may have had to get Skattebo on the phone.
But out of all those candidates, this committee (of one) decided to give the award to Jeudy. Mostly because the game was one of the wildest prime-time contests of the season, and I thought it would be fun to relive the night with one of its chief protagonists.
A quick PSA: You can follow every octopus in real-time thanks to our official octopus bot. We’ve got nearly 9,000 followers on our automated bot on Twitter/X, and created similar accounts on BlueSky and Threads. (Also, if you are the kind of person who knows how to create bots on the latter two platforms, please get in touch.)
You can’t talk about Jeudy’s octopus without the context of what came right before it. Bo Nix had just thrown a 93-yard touchdown pass, airing out a deep ball to Marvin Mims that put Denver up 28–17. After a touchback on the kickoff, Jeudy responded on Cleveland’s first play of the next drive. He got past the whole defense on a post route and gathered in a ball from Jameis Winston that traveled 50 yards in the air. Kids playing in the backyard dream about back-to-back touchdowns of 70-plus yards on Monday Night Football, and we got to see it play out.
JERRY JEUDY IS HAVING A NIGHT. 70 YARDS ON THIS ONE.
— NFL (@NFL) December 3, 2024
📺: #CLEvsDEN on ESPN
📱: Stream on #NFLPlus pic.twitter.com/D5UWftz6ca
It was not the longest touchdown in NFL octopus history (Calvin Johnson had a 96-yarder in 2008) but I can’t remember another octopus where a player turned around to fall backward into the end zone in celebration.
Usually when a guy sprints 70 yards to the end zone in that Denver altitude, the camera shows them sucking down oxygen on the bench. In this case, the team came right back to Jeudy, who was the primary read on the two-point play. “I had a five-yard out route, with a corner behind me,” he recalled. “And Jameis threw a great ball and I made a play. The coach believed that I could score the touchdown and come back and get the two-point conversion for him. So he called my number and it was time for me to make a play.”
The top storyline of the night was how badly Jeudy torched his former team, finishing with nine catches for 235 yards. He had catches of 35, 17 and 16 yards in the fourth quarter, as the boos kept raining down and intensifying. Jeudy relished his role that night, which included chirping with former teammates. He mentioned D.J. Jones and P.J. Locke in particular, as defenders who were in his ear.
“They were telling me during the game that I gotta chill out a little bit. As in, like, I gotta slow down cause I was just dominating out there. … It was pretty funny at the time.”
Jeudy asking for more from the crowd 😂 pic.twitter.com/M0lQ73V3TD
— NFL (@NFL) December 3, 2024
Jeudy set not just a career high, but a relatively obscure NFL record: the most receiving yards a player had ever registered in one game against his former team. Not just the first game against a former team, or against the team that drafted you, but any player in any game against any former team. The previous record was Terrell Owens’s 213 yards for the Cowboys against the 49ers in 2008. It was one of those stats that circulated on social media after that game and got written up on seemingly every website on the internet.
He was demure in his postgame media availability that night, downplaying his statistical output because it came in a loss. With a few months of hindsight, it did sound a little easier to appreciate the night, though his original sentiment remained.
“It’s a blessing,” Jeudy told me. “It’s always great being able to break records and play the way I did. Get all them catches, get all them yards. I’m always thankful for that. It would have been better if we would’ve gotten the W, but we did our best.”
The night went back and forth in entertaining fashion. Jeudy’s octopus cut an 11-point deficit down to the three, and the Browns eventually took a 32–21 lead. But with Cleveland trailing by two points inside the two-minute warning, Winston threw a pass toward the sideline that was intercepted by Ja’Quan McMillian, who fell down, stood up and returned it 44 yards for a pick-six. It was his second pick-six of the night, following a 71-yarder by Nik Bonitto in the second quarter.
Winston finished with a textbook Jameis stat line: 34-for-58 for 497 yards, 4 TDs and 3 INTs, with Jeudy’s 235 accounting for nearly half of the yards. The Broncos won 41–32 and improved to 8–5, on their way to a wild-card berth, while the Browns fell to 3–9.
But for Jeudy, it was the statistical high point of a breakout season. The Broncos made him the 15th pick in the 2020 draft, and he spent four years in Denver. In his first season with Cleveland, he caught a career-high 90 balls for 1,229 yards. It was his first time topping the 1,000-yard mark and making the Pro Bowl.
“Of course, you want to finish with the team you start off with, but you know, things change, God has other plans. So I had to go somewhere to really be able to showcase my talent,” he said. “The Cleveland Browns put me in the best position possible to be able to be successful. I’m very appreciative of them for that. And I just took advantage of every opportunity they gave me, once I got a chance to really showcase what I’m about.”
Now he’s on a Cleveland team that has been the talk of the league this offseason, after overhauling the quarterback room by signing Joe Flacco, trading for Kenny Pickett, and drafting Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders. The football world is waiting to see who will break the huddle as QB1 when the regular season starts.
“We’ve got four great quarterbacks, so I’m excited to see what the coach’s decision is when it comes to that,” Jeudy said. “I’m just gonna keep doing my part and performing how I’ve been performing, and just try to make it easier for whichever quarterback starts the season.”
(We spoke before the team added a fifth notable quarterback, signing veteran Tyler Huntley.)
Jeudy has a measured approach to the 2025 season, with no grand proclamations for new goals to chase. “I just wanna be better than I was the year prior,” he said. “I just wanna keep on growing, keep getting better at my craft, just be better than I was last year.”
At least that was how he felt before we spoke. I did have to ask whether the Octopus of the Year Award would be a goal of his. You know, now that he knows it exists. Will the thought cross his mind the next time the Browns line up to go for two?
“Yeah, for sure,” he said. “I’ll make sure I’ll be in my coach’s ear about that. Hey, I need that octopus trophy.”
Well, uhhh, this is awkward. We never said anything about a trophy.
“I’m very appreciative,” he finished up. “And hopefully next year I receive it again. I’m gonna do my best to score more touchdowns and two-point conversions, to the best of my ability.”
That’s all we here at the octopus awards committee can ask for.
And finally, a little housekeeping.
The first few years I wrote this column, I embedded a document with the list of every octopus ever. Now that Pro Football Reference has that list, I no longer do. But if you want to remember some guys (and some games), there are 197 of them to sift through on their list.
That said, I still track the players who have multiple octopi in their careers. Nobody new joined the list, though, as mentioned above, Adams moved ahead of the glut of players with two. And below that, check out the updated list of octopi by franchise.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jerry Jeudy Wins 2024 Octopus of the Year Award.
