Bobo Burn 'Em: Seahawks Jake Bobo, Jaxon Smith-Njigba's finest college games
Jake Bobo vs Washington, Jaxon Smith-Njigba's legendary Rose Bowl against Utah
When Jake Bobo decided to sign with the Seattle Seahawks after the draft, did he already have a special place in his heart for playing in football games associated with the city? Bobo now has a chance to turn his reputation in Seattle around from being a Huskies killer to being a Seahawks dream maker.
Almost exactly 11 months ago, 4-0 UCLA was hosting 4-0 University of Washington and Bobo had a career-making performance that must be at least partly responsible for his entry into the NFL as an undrafted free agent. After a four-year career at Duke that didn’t take off until his senior season, Bobo caught 15 passes for 231 yards and one touchdown in his first four games with the Bruins.
Then on the biggest stage of his career to that point, Bobo emerged as quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson’s favorite target, catching six passes for 142 yards and two touchdowns in a 40-32 upset over the Huskies. How significant was it for Bobo to catch two touchdowns against a Washington team that was ranked 15th in the country at the time?
He caught three touchdowns at Duke. Three touchdowns in 41 games.
It’s not fair to say that Bobo became a “national sensation” after that game, in part because of rookie teammate receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and the fact that by comparison college football has never seen anything like JSN’s final eight games of 2021 (77 catches, 1,257 yards, six touchdowns), but UCLA head coach Chip Kelly then knew he could count on his transfer to be DTR’s safety valve for the rest of the season.
Bobo caught two more touchdowns the next week against Utah; had a season-high eight catches for 101 yards the following week against Oregon; and stacked “nice job, Bobo” games for UCLA the rest of the way en route to 817 yards and seven touchdowns.
I’m not going to go over Jake Bobo’s life story—because we already went over that in his origin story—but I will highlight more from his performance against Washington and the rest of his lone season with the Bruins. I’m also going to go back to Jaxon Smith-Njigba and finish part four his his four-part Super Joes origin story by recounting his legendary 347-yard game against Utah in the Rose Bowl.
Read JSN Part I (High School), JSN Part II (First Half of 2021), JSN Part III (Second Half of 2021) if you want to join the Super Joes and get caught up.
“What is Super Joes?” If you weren’t here when this bonus was first announced, essentially Substack (the website I use for the newsletter) gives subscribers an option to sign up for $120 for the year if they wanted to support at a slightly higher level than the regular $5/month. I didn’t expect anyone to sign up for it but then a bunch of people did and I felt like it would be ungrateful if I didn’t create like 1% more content as a “thank you” to them.
So once a month I create one more bonus article and it’s just slightly more content than the usual free newsletter that goes out every single day and the 3-4 bonus articles per week. In case you’re wondering, there were 20 bonus articles for Regular Joes in August. That’s over 30 free Seahawks articles this month if you’re a free member, and over 50 total Seahawks articles if you’re a member of the Regular Joes. This is just one more. Consider this like a viewing party of Jake Bobo and JSN’s best games in college.
If you’ve already signed up for Regular Joes and you want to upgrade, you can do that at a prorated rate for the year.
If you want to watch UCLA-Washington highlights for free instead, you can do that here. If you want to watch JSN vs. Utah in the Rose Bowl for free instead, you can do that here.