There it was again, that play by the Detroit Lions. He is proof that professional football player Amon-Ra St. Brown is the rare breed of athlete where everyone knows what is coming and yet no one can do anything about it. It is comparable to Arjen Robben’s inward dribble, Mike Tyson’s left hook or Dirk Nowitzki’s backwards drop throw. So St. Brown runs a few meters forward and looks for contact with the opponent. This is followed by a seal hook, usually to the inside, through which he gives himself some space for a brief moment – and that’s enough for well-rehearsed, world-class people like St. Brown and Lions quarterback Jared Goff.
Goff serves perfectly, and St. Brown? Whether he catches the leather egg depends on whether you describe the scene from the beginning of the game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this Monday or the end of the first half against the Kansas City Chiefs the weekend before. Against the Chiefs he let the ball slip through his hands. It was the only one of ten Goff passes that he didn’t catch. “I have to catch him – who knows how the game will end,” he said afterwards. Instead of possibly 17:6 it was 10:13 at the break and 17:30 at the end. “Of course it annoys me now, but not for too long,” said St. Brown: “Learn from it and then do better.”
Two strange incidents are causing a stir in the American football league NFL – and are being severely sanctioned.
Like in the first offensive series against Tampa: This time St. Brown caught the ball and ran into the opposing end zone. “I don’t know how to stop him either,” said ESPN commentator Joe Buck, widely known for believing he knows everything about the sport. Addition from partner Troy Aikman, quarterback legend: “Me neither. Unstoppable.” Tampa tried man, space and double coverage – St. Brown still caught six passes for 86 yards of space and a touchdown.
These are roughly St. Brown’s averages from the first seven games of the season, of which the Lions won five. Even more astonishing: St. Brown, the son of a German mother, has caught 50 of 61 passes so far, which is a grotesquely good figure. In his career so far, he already has the best catch rate in NFL history among wide receivers with at least 200 catches – and he’s getting even better in his fifth professional season: his career value is 76 percent, and so far this season he has caught 82 percent of passes.
One does not do St. Brown an injustice when one describes him as conscientious, driven, hard-working, a perfectionist – one can also see a lot of hard work behind his successes. “If someone had told me five years ago that it would happen like this, I would have called the person crazy,” he says himself. “On the other hand, it didn’t happen overnight either. There was always small progress, so to be honest it’s not that crazy anymore. I’ve been working towards it.”
He’s still obsessed with proving he’s better than the 16 wide receivers selected ahead of him in the 2021 draft. He can recite their names at three in the morning. But he also realized that he had to break away from it because, given his successes with the previously notorious losers from Detroit, he was on a different, higher level. He’s now the one with the $30 million annual salary whose headstand celebration is part of the football video game “Madden.” And who you see on breakfast cereal boxes next to Justin Jefferson (Minnesota Vikings) and Ja’Marr Chase (Cincinnati Bengals) – according to many observers, the three best pass catchers in the world at the moment.
The Lions are the only franchise that has been in the NFL since the beginning and hasn’t even reached the finals yet
But it also means: St. Brown no longer tells the story of the underestimated, but rather that of the savior who should finally give the Lions their first Super Bowl participation in history. The Lions are the only franchise that has been around since the beginning of the NFL that hasn’t even reached the Finals, let alone won it. After the bitter semi-final exit two years ago, the Lions were one of the top teams last season – and lost their first playoff game. “The injuries were hard for us,” he says, but emphasizes that no one would be interested in the injury misery of biblical proportions in the fall of 2025. The statistics say: exit in the first playoff round. “It was very bitter, even days later.”
St. Brown is an athlete who is enthusiastic about numbers because they incorruptibly communicate what you have achieved. This means you are not dependent on whether the manager of a franchise thinks you are good enough at the talent exchange. And St. Brown strives for perfection, he wants to catch every ball. In the previous season he once caught all 31 passes he received over seven weeks. In the game against Cleveland he was once again flawless, seven out of seven. But perfection is rarely achieved, see the Chiefs game: nine out of ten, but he dropped this one. “You don’t think about it during the game anyway,” he says – after the mistake he caught all eight passes: “Later you think about it: first angry, then analyzing, then you think about next week.”
The Lions’ great strength so far has been learning surprisingly well from defeats (like at the beginning of the season against the Green Bay Packers) and thus also dealing with losses in the dugout. The Lions had lost five coaches, including those responsible for offense, defense and wide receivers, to other clubs. “But we still have the same players,” says St. Brown. Behind what is still probably the best offensive protector in the league is the calm and precise Goff. David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs are the best running duo in the league. And hoping for passes are the bully Sam LaPorta, the constantly steep sprinter Jameson Williams – and of course St. Brown, who no one knows how to stop in the face of this offensive.
“You shouldn’t despair after a mistake – but you also shouldn’t fly too high just because you’re on a roll,” says St. Brown like a sports philosopher. As such, he knows that in the end, as they emphasize at every opportunity, US sports only knows one unit of measurement when evaluating a career: Has a person won a title? That’s why St. Brown says: “I have personal goals. But only I know them, so no one can say that I haven’t achieved them. Otherwise everything is known: Super Bowl – my goal and all of ours!” Everyone knows what St. Brown will do. The question is whether anyone will be able to stop him.
