Two weeks ago, Puka Nacua led the NFL’s receiving leaderboard, looking untouchable as the Los Angeles Rams’ breakout star. Then, wide receivers Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Ja’Marr Chase caught fire.
The two wideouts have now overtaken Nacua in receiving yards. Smith-Njigba now leads the league with 696 yards after two straight dominant performances; eight receptions, 132 yards and one touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and eight receptions, 162 yards one touchdown against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Chase jumped Nacua for second on the receiving yardage board after the Cincinnati Bengals defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers on Thursday Night Football, hauling in 16 catches for 162 yards and a touchdown.
Meanwhile Nacua — who’s now second in the league in receptions after Chase’s monster game — is now battling an ankle injury sustained in Sunday’s 17–3 win over the Baltimore Ravens, and will now miss this week’s matchup against Jacksonville in London.
The question now becomes whether Nacua will be able to sustain the pace that made him one of the NFL’s most reliable and complete receivers.
Through the first four weeks of the 2025 NFL season, Puka Nacua was more than 100 yards ahead of the rest of the league in receiving yards and was well on pace to match former teammate Cooper Kupp’s triple-crown 2021 season.
Even with only one score in the first month of the season, Nacua’s snap-to-snap production was elite with an average of over 4.0 yards per route run (YPRR) through the first four games — a metric that measures efficiency by taking the average receiving yards a player generates each time they run a passing route.
It’s one of the very best innovative metrics for assessing a receiver’s effectiveness rather than total receiving yards, which can be inflated by a high volume of playing time or total pass attempts by the team.
Currently, Puka Nacua’s YPRR is now at 3.42 behind Smith-Njigba’s astonishing 4.43, leading the league in that metric by over a full yard.
For Nacua to become the league’s best receiver and win the Offensive Player of the year award, he will have to pass the real test — sustainability.
The Rams’ receiver has already proven he can produce at an elite level, but the coming weeks will show whether he can maintain it while battling both injury and attention. Depending on the severity of Nacua’s ankle sprain, it could threaten to derail his rhythm at a time when consistency is everything trying to keep up with Smith-Njigba and Chase.
Even though the injury doesn’t seem to be long-term, an ankle sprain is the type of lingering injury that can limit explosiveness and make a receiver’s separation, cuts and timing much harder to execute.
What’s made Nacua so valuable to the Rams isn’t just his volume of catches, but the efficiency behind them. So far in his career, he’s turned short-yardage plays into first downs, absorbed hits across the middle and maintained precision in his routes no matter the coverage.
Playing through the pain and maintaining that level of reliability is what separates the good from the great — and Nacua’s response to adversity will define how the rest of this season is remembered.
It’s one thing to dominate the first month of the season. It’s another to still be standing at the top when adversity hits.