Calling Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson a future Hall of Famer is not a controversial statement.
He and Lance Alworth are the only players in NFL history to average at least 100 receiving yards per game in three-straight seasons.
His 1,964 receiving yards in 2012 is the highest season total the league has ever seen by more than 100 yards.
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A physical freak at 6’5 and 239 pounds, Calvin Johnson is still one of the NFL’s most feared receivers as he heads into his ninth season.
That got me thinking: how far away is he from being a Hall of Fame lock?
While Johnson is certainly on track to be enshrined as a Hall of Famer when his playing days are done, he still has work to before reaching the point that he could quit playing and feel confident about his place in the Hall.
I started with trying to put together a statistical profile for what a Hall of Fame wide receiver looks like. Since the game is ever-evolving, I wanted to limit the pool of Hall of Fame wide receivers I compared Johnson to to players who had played at least a portion of their career into the 1990s.
The group consists of seven players: James Lofton, Michael Irvin, Art Monk, Jerry Rice, Cris Carter, Andre Reed and Tim Brown.
Those seven wide receivers finished with an average of 1,021 receptions for 14,794 yards and 103 touchdowns.
Through eight seasons, Calvin Johnson has amassed 643 receptions for 10,405 yards and 74 touchdowns, leaving him 378 receptions, 4,389 yards and 29 touchdowns short of the average of my seven player comparison group.
That difference over four seasons is 94.5 catches, 1,097.25 receiving yards and 7.25 touchdowns per year. Doable totals considering Calvin is coming off a 1,077 yard, eight touchdown season in only 13 games in 2014.
Could Calvin finish with something less than that stat line and still get voted into the Hall of Fame? I think he could – especially since the average can be viewed as inflated due to the longevity of Jerry Rice.
Johnson already has more touchdowns than Michael Irvin and is 107 receptions and 1,499 receiving yards from matching Irvin’s career totals. By that measure, Johnson might have enough to warrant a Hall call after the 2016 season.
Take out Jerry Rice’s ridiculous career totals from the average and Calvin is looking at three good seasons to officially reach a Hall of Fame level. But to be considered a lock such that he would no longer have to add to his statistical totals with a high level of certainty, Calvin Johnson needs four more good seasons.
He doesn’t have the stats to make it right now, but he is only two to four seasons away depending on the baseline you want to use.
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