From the moment he entered the league, Justin Jefferson has hovered near the top of the NFL's historical curve. He is the only player to surpass 3,000 receiving yards in his first two seasons. Then he was the fastest or tied for the fastest to surpass milestones at 4,000, 5,000 and 6,000 yards. And he was the youngest player ever to reach 7,000 yards.
Yet as he continues along a Hall of Fame path, with 529 career receptions for 7,960 yards and 41 touchdowns entering the Minnesota Vikings' game Thursday night at the Los Angeles Chargers (8:15 p.m. Prime Video), he has almost no chance of breaking any of the NFL's career receiving records.
Jefferson is only 26 and is currently on a hot streak, averaging 109.3 receiving yards per game since Week 4. But like many before him, Jefferson is up against arguably the most unbreakable records in pro football.
Jerry Rice -- the first NFL player who earned the now-ubiquitous GOAT nickname after a career that spanned three decades from 1985 to 2004 -- set a standard that has weathered the NFL's transition into a passing-dominated league.
Rice's record of 22,895 career receiving yards would require Jefferson to continue producing at his current levels until he is 35, according to ESPN Research. The same unlikely scenarios exist for Rice's record of 197 touchdowns and 1,549 receptions.
At age 25, for instance, Bengals receiver Ja'Marr Chase would have to maintain his current touchdown rate of 0.74 per game for 12 more seasons to reach it. Receiver Larry Fitzgerald retired at 37 after 17 seasons and ranks second in receptions, 127 short of Rice, and there isn't an active player within 500 catches of Rice's record.
"I've watched so much about him on video and it's just crazy what he did," Jefferson told ESPN. "It's crazy because so much was different back then from now. It's so much more advanced now. The throwing game has upgraded so much. So the fact that he had 22,000 in those times is unreal.
"What if he had more passing? What would he have if he was in this type of system [in Minnesota]? What type of numbers would he have? So it's definitely tough to really think about breaking them. That's why he's always going to have the argument for being the GOAT. To have 22,000 yards, it's unreal."
Rice retired in 2005 before most of today's players were out of elementary school and the league expanded the season from 16 to 17 games (2021). He did not respond to multiple interview requests over the past year, but during that period, ESPN has spoken to many of the NFL's top young pass catchers, players whose careers have started strong enough to merit theoretical discussion about NFL records.
Most of them laughed at the idea of producing 1,000-yard seasons in their late 30s, as Rice did repeatedly. After Rice turned 30, he had four consecutive double-digit touchdown seasons and had at least 63 receptions in eight seasons, including two after he was 40. Rice was 42 in his final season, which he played with the Seattle Seahawks.
"Crazy," Chargers receiver Ladd McConkey said. "I mean, I think about my dad. He's in his upper 40s, and that's like seeing my dad out there playing. I don't know about that."
"Wild," the Jacksonville Jaguars' Brian Thomas Jr said.
"I can't imagine it," New York Giants receiver Malik Nabers said. "I'll be so old."
Said Las Vegas Raiders tight end Brock Bowers: "That's nuts. Even now, I think of people who've played for 10 years and everyone's saying that's a long time. In 10 years, I'll be only 31, 32. And I'm like, 'That seems like a long time.'"
"Unheard of," Jefferson said. "You just try to get past five seasons in this league. To be 42, running routes, catching a ball and getting hit? That's just a credit to him."
From a relative sense, Jefferson has as strong a candidacy as anyone. He is one of the NFL's best route runners, a skill that in theory should allow him to continue getting open long after he is past his physical prime, and he has had one significant injury, a left hamstring strain that cost him seven games in 2023. He has caught passes from eight different quarterbacks since 2020, as the Vikings have searched for the kind of Hall of Fame-worthy passer that Rice enjoyed for most of his career, from Joe Montana to Steve Young.
"Right now he's just a per-year goal-oriented guy," Vikings receivers coach Keenan McCardell said. "He's not looking out at Jerry. He knows it's out there. He knows how fast he's reaching these milestones, but he's just kind of like, 'I'm just doing Justin right now.'
"And I want him to think that way. ... You look at guys like [Tampa Bay's] Mike Evans who got to 1,000 yards in 11 straight years. One day you could look up and Justin might have 15 of them. And he'd still be short of Jerry."
RICE, THE NO. 16 pick of the 1985 draft by the 49ers, played the majority of his career in a different era of NFL offenses. The league was only beginning to transition away from run-based systems with rules that incentivized passing. Illegal contact was added to the rule book in 1978 to restrict some contact beyond 5 yards down the field. Protecting defenseless players began in 1995, but receivers were not truly protected from hits to the head and neck area until those rules were clarified in 2009.
The passing game was far less efficient than it is today. The leaguewide completion percentage in the 1980s was 55.5%. In the 1990s, it crept up to 57.3%, still far away from the 65.5% that offenses have produced in 2025. Simply put, a pass was much less likely to be caught during the time Rice was building his unbreakable records.
Rice produced four 100-catch seasons and eight with at least 90 receptions, along with 14 1,000-yard seasons and nine with at least 10 touchdowns. It wasn't all as a young player, either. He led the NFL in receiving yards six times, three before he turned 30 and three after -- at ages 31, 32 and 33. He led the league in receptions in 1996 with 108 at age 34 and his final two 1,000-yard seasons came at ages 39 and 40 (2001-02).
"Passing just wasn't as big back then," the Jaguars' Thomas said. "So to see how the evolution of the game just evolved with more passing the ball instead of running the ball first, it's crazy to say he had that many yards consecutively and consistently."
McCardell grew up with posters of Rice on his bedroom wall. The Vikings receivers coach was drafted in 1991 and overlapped with the final 14 seasons of Rice's career.
"In those days, you dealt with a lot more physical play all the way around -- when you went over the middle and at the line of scrimmage," McCardell said. "There weren't flags because they weren't protecting defenseless receivers in those days.
"I mean, every time you came across, you were going to get hit. At the line of scrimmage, they were grabbing and holding. DBs could put their hands on guys and the referees would let them. They weren't just trying to push you off your route in press coverage. They were trying to put you underneath the water cooler. So that's what receivers dealt with."
Rice elevated with fanatical conditioning and precise route running crafted from years of muscle memory created in practice. Speaking in 2010 during his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Rice recalled that he laid bricks with his father and brothers during the summer, with his work days starting at 5 a.m.
Even then, he said, he was "afraid to fail" and disappoint his father. That attitude drove his career, he said.
"People are always surprised how insecure I was," Rice said in the speech. "I love it when some commentary would refer to an upstart receiver as the next Jerry Rice. That made me work even harder. It was as if I was saying, 'You're going to have to work so hard to get to where I am, and if you can pay that price, you deserve it.'"
No one has come close. McCardell recalls some players being hesitant to accept Rice's invitations to train because of how difficult his sessions were rumored to be.
"Jerry wasn't crazy -- he was just dedicated to doing the things that he needed to do to be the greatest of all time," said McCardell, who compared Rice to boxer Muhammad Ali. "I think of Ali as the greatest of all time. ... Professional people loved him.
"Jerry was the same way. He was a classy professional. Everybody loved him. He had a little arrogance about him that some people didn't like, but you have to have that to be the greatest."
Era debates dominate conversations in pro sports. Ultimately, they are fodder for conversation but not conclusions. Who knows how today's receivers would produce in the environment of the Rice era?
"I think about that," the Chargers' McConkey said. "But what are we going to do? Go back and do it? I don't know. So, I think about that in basketball too. You think about Lebron [James] and MJ [Michael Jordan]. What would they do in each other's eras? You can sit there and speculate, and I feel like all the old heads are like, 'Oh, they wouldn't do nothing.' And we're like, 'Oh yeah, they would.' But I'm not sure."
THE NUMBERS ARE daunting, no matter how you look at them. It's one thing to say that Jefferson would need to produce triple his current career output. It's another to think about it in terms of individual seasons.
If Jefferson matches his rough average of 1,500 receiving yards in each season between now and 2034, he would challenge Rice's receiving yards record by age 35. There is only one instance in NFL history of a player older than 31 compiling a 1,500-yard season: Jerry Rice at age 33 in 1995.
Upon hearing that timeline, Jefferson laughed and said it would be a "pretty good number."
"Hey man," he said, "whenever guys tell me the wheels are falling off, that's when I'm hanging it up. Until then, yeah, I'm definitely trying to get as much and get what I can. But once you get past the thirties, that's when it gets tough. That's when your body starts feeling tremendously different. You got to have a different routine, different diet, all of that stuff. So as I'm getting older, I'm trying to learn more and more as I get older."
Chase, meanwhile, passed Rice this season for the most 150-yard receiving games in his first five seasons (nine). He needs only 16,841 more career yards, and 146 touchdowns, to match Rice.
"It's cool," Chase said. "[But] I would never know what that is until you all tell me at the end of the day. It's a cool opportunity hearing it, but I've still got a long way to go. That's the goal, to go get a Super Bowl and a gold [Hall of Fame] jacket."
Rice played four seasons at Mississippi Valley State and was 23 when he joined the NFL. To even be in the Rice discussion, a player would almost certainly have to enter the league at the youngest age possible -- 20 or 21 -- to make up for the unlikelihood that he will play into his 40s as Rice did. That further hinders some of today's biggest stars, such as the Los Angeles Rams' Puka Nacua, who was 22 as a rookie.
As driven as players such as Jefferson, Chase and others are, none of them are thinking seriously about Rice's records -- perhaps the ultimate show of respect for his accomplishments.
"If I'm being honest?" Chase said. "No."
Dallas Cowboys receiver CeeDee Lamb, in his sixth season, compiled 6,339 receiving yards in his first five campaigns, 25 behind Rice's production over the same period. Lamb called it a "huge honor to even be remotely close to him" but added: "Take it with a grain of salt and keep going."
Baltimore Ravens receiver DeAndre Hopkins, 33, leads all active players with 13,143 receiving yards -- nearly 10,000 fewer than Rice. Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, 36, is the leading active pass-catcher (1,035), 514 off of Rice's record, while the Los Angeles Rams' Davante Adams (33) holds the active lead in touchdown receptions at 109, a mere 88 shy of Rice.
Hopkins, Kelce, Evans and Adams are all likely nearing the ends of their careers. So for Jefferson, challenging Rice is "not really something that I strive for, something that I'll really look forward to and have it written on my mirror trying to accomplish.
"Of course I think about what my legacy will be when it's all said and done," he added. "I definitely want to leave a great mark and definitely would like my name to be installed into the Hall of Fame, getting the gold jacket of course, and being listed as one of the greats and with those that have played the game before us. So hopefully I'm just in that conversation."
ESPN NFL Nation reporters Todd Archer, Ben Baby, Mike DiRocco, Paul Gutierrez, Jordan Raanan and Kris Rhim contributed to this story.
All charts courtesy of ESPN Research.