Hall of Fame wide receiver Jerry Rice is widely regarded as being not only the best player at his position that the league has seen, but also arguably the greatest of all time.
This has given plenty of gravity to his opinion on the wide receiver as he recently ranked who he believed were currently in the top five after the 2017 NFL season with a bit of a surprising choice for the top spot.
.@JerryRice's TOP FIVE NFL WRs ⬇️⬇️
📺: Don't miss Breaking Ground TONIGHT (8pm ET) https://t.co/jZIyQk63of
— NFL Network (@nflnetwork) February 10, 2018
.@JerryRice has his top 5 WRs. ⬇️
Who are yours? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/dCpYeozq29
— NFL Network (@nflnetwork) February 10, 2018
It's quite a difficult list to narrow down given the abundance of talent at the position around the league, but these five players have been commonly mentioned at the top of the list over the last couple of years. Larry Fitzgerald has continued to prove to be an ageless wonder while AJ Green and Odell Beckham Jr. have certainly earned their place in this conversation. This has typically found the Pittsburgh Steelers wideout Antonio Brown being named as the top player in the NFL at wide receiver given the vast amount of production he has had through the first eight years of his career.
Brown has been a statistical juggernaut as his 733 receptions, and 9,910 receiving yards are the most since he entered the NFL back in 2010. This also includes holding the NFL record for most catches (582) and receiving yards (7,848) over a five-year span along with being the league leader with 19 games with at least 10 catches and 16 of those such contests with 100 receiving yards. He is coming off another highly productive campaign where he recorded 101 catches for a league-best 1,533 receiving yards despite missing the final two games due to injury.
That said, Julio Jones of the Atlanta Falcons has certainly made a case to be mentioned in the conversation as he has been quite productive throughout his career. He recorded more than 1,000 receiving yards in five of his first seven seasons with the Falcons, including the last four straight years while setting a career-best mark with 136 receptions back in the 2015 campaign. Jones has the complete package with the big-play ability combined with strong hands and ideal body frame for the position at 6-foot-4 and 220 lbs.
It's an argument that genuinely doesn't have any wrong answer, but it's quite interesting to see Jerry Rice weigh in on the current crop of star wide receivers.
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