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I was beginning to worry that the octopus was an endangered species. It was Week 15 of the NFL season and the quirky statistic we pioneered here at The MMQB had only crawled out of its den twice all year.
I’dcoined the term in 2019, celebrating the players who scored a touchdown and then also scored the ensuing two-point conversion on the same drive. I’d followed it up by writing a column each offseason thereafter, congratulating my annual Octopus of the Year award winner, and diligently tracking the broadcasters who name-dropped it on the air and the other ways its, well, tentacles had spread through the NFL world.
But as the calendar hit December, I knew we were still waiting for the season’s biggest splash. Then, with a prime-time audience watching on Thursday Night Football, Chris Godwin Jr. caught a pass in the Buccaneers’ creamsicle-clad end zone to put Tampa Bay up 12 points on the Falcons. The Bucs lined up to go for two, and Baker Mayfield once again connected with Godwin in practically the same spot in the grass.
Emeka Egbuka ran over to celebrate, the Amazon cameras cut to a perfectly timed tight shot of the two receivers, and we crossed a new threshold in octopus history. “OCTOPUS!” Egbuka yelled, loud enough to be picked up by the field-level microphones. And with that, just about every contact in my phone reached out to me at nearly the same decibel level Egbuka had hit that night in Tampa.
“It was Emeka,” Godwin confirmed a few months later, when I asked him which player had yelled. “I remember him saying it. Because in the moment, I was just gassed up that we got the two-point conversion. I wasn’t even thinking that it was an octopus, but he came up and he was hyped. He was like, OCTOPUS! I was like, Aha … ”
They weren’t the only ones excited about what had transpired.
Octopus of the Year awards
Welcome to our seventh annual Octopus of the Year awards, The MMQB’s most self-indulgent awards show. It began as a quiet year on the octopus front, but we made up for it with a couple of milestones showing how far our little box score oddity has spread. That includes a late-summer surprise with a clue on ESPN Jeopardy!, and both Joe Buck and Kyle Brandt checked in to discuss that moment below.
But first, the envelope, please. We are making history this year, as for the first time I’m declaring cowinners of the grand prize. The Buccaneers’ wide receiver room accounted for two of the season’s three octopi—the fewest in one season since 2011 and down from an average of nine over the previous three years. With Egbuka and Godwin forever linked by my favorite three seconds of video from the 2025 season, it felt only fitting to give them the award together.
Buccaneers’ social team helps spread the word
To understand how we got to the moment when Egbuka and Godwin celebrated on the field, we must rewind the clock a bit. It started in Week 5, when Egbuka had the biggest day of his rookie season. His seven catches and 163 yards against the Seahawks both held up as season highs. His touchdown gave him five in the first five games of his career. And he capped it off with an octopus. The performance clearly deserved a graphic from the Bucs’ social team.
With a little boost from yours truly and those who, ahem, traffic in these waters, it racked up about 15 million impressions.
So that enterprising Bucs social team, which was quickly becoming my favorite around the league, decided they weren’t done. A few days later, they posted this video asking the team’s receivers whether they were familiar with the stat they had so casually included on the graphic.
Two days later, even Gronk asked Egbuka about it.
“I heard about it the year before,” Godwin says. “But you just kind of forget about it because it’s so rare. … So when Mek got it the first time in Seattle, it was a huge deal. We were like, Oh, this is sick. And then for it to happen again later in the year, I’d be curious to see how many teams have had two octopi in one year. I’m sure it’s not that many.”
Well, the good news for Godwin is that’s an easy answer to look up. Here’s a general housekeeping reminder that our friends at Pro Football Referencecreated a tracker that shows all 200 in NFL history and updates daily throughout the season. I also have automated trackers that will populate your social media feeds on game day, whether you preferTwitter/X,BlueSky orThreads, along witha new Instagram account for more octopus merriment and miscellany.
The bad news for Godwin is that teams (and even individual players) have had two in one season much more than he realized. All-time octopus king Todd Gurley had three in 2018 alone, but that gives the Bucs’ receivers something to shoot for.
(Maybe Godwin had a sense it was rare for a Buccaneer. Would you believe the franchise only had one in its history—agame-tying double score by Vincent Jackson in 2012—before hauling in two this past season?)
I did ask Godwin if he could break one of three single-game NFL records—21 catches, 336 yards or two octopi—which he would choose. “Yards was my first inclination,” he said. “But you could have 300 yards and have no touchdowns, right? And in theory, you might be helping your team because you’re getting a lot of yards, but you could have a lot of yards if your team is down by 21 points in the first half and now you’re throwing the ball. But if you scored three touchdowns and you get three extra points like that, 24 points, like that’s directly contributing to winning. So I think I pick that one.”
Good answer!
Jeopardy!asks: What is an Octopus?
Kyle Brandt was not haunted by the clues he got wrong on ESPN Jeopardy!. He says that in the months between when episodes taped and when they aired, he spent much more energy thinking about the times he got out-buzzed.
So he didn’t even remember this moment until he watched it back:
“Snowman is lame golf course humor slang for an 8,” he told me. “I have written many 8s on my scorecards over the years, and that fat little snowman bastard has planted roots in my brain as the sole proprietor of the number 8 in sports.”
Having recorded my share of 8s as well, I knew exactly where his brain had taken him. Unfortunately, this snowman landed him in my crosshairs, despite an impressive run that took him to the tournament’s final.
“I’ve heard the octopus pertaining to football before,” he said, noting that longtime octopus supporter Scott Hanson uses it regularly on RedZone. “And I love Scott. But it wasn’t Scott’s voice that I heard there on the Alex Trebek Stage. It was my own voice, dropping f-bombs after another four-putt.”
Brandt says that sensation when you buzz in and then immediately realize you don’t have the answer is not a momentary feeling. “It’s just constant,” he said. “From the moment I walked on set, I was nervous and manic. There’s no time to rejoice or despair—because the next clue is already coming. It’s a trip, but I was exhausted after the shows.”
He recovered, winning his first two episodes and bringing excitement to the stage with some aggressive wagering, not unlike a head coach calling for a two-point conversion, which of course we support.
One person who would have gotten the octopus clue correct was standing on the other side of the podium: Joe Buck, who had guest hosted the original Jeopardy! program for a week in 2021 and was tapped to host ESPN’s version this summer.
“It’s very, very, very, very similar,” Buck said, walking me through a comparison between the two versions of the show. “It’s the same writers. It’s the same daily routine where you show up and you go to the library, as they call it—which it is, in a world with dwindling libraries—and you’ve got basically this table filled with the smartest people you’ve ever been around in your life.”
In that room, Buck would practice going through clues, asking for background or pronunciations. “And I ask, very sheepishly, dumb questions that they probably laugh about after I walk out of the room,” he added.
But in a world where he says part of the fun of Jeopardy! is deciphering how the clue is worded and what the heck it’s really asking for, he called the octopus clue pretty straightforward. “I’m just reading them all in front of these people, and it was one of the few times I could show that I knew an answer without having to ask for any clarification.”
So we thank those brainy Jeopardy! writers for being RedZone viewers, or possibly prop bettors or Instagram followers.
I did let Brandt know that, especially now that he’s become part of octopus lore, a lot of people will be rooting to see one during his popular Angry Runs segment next season.
“Me too, man,” Brandt said. “A Cam Skattebo octopus could fix me.”
Buck, for his part, is ready to spread the word as well.
“You can tell your readers with 100% certainty, if I am smart enough to recognize in the moment that an octopus has been accomplished, I will definitely call it out,” he told me.
“You have my word,” he doubled down. “Now that doesn’t mean that I’m smart enough to, in the moment, realize it, but I will give it my best.”
Buck also brought up a memorable story from 2007, when Conan O’Brien promised to donate $1,000 to the charity of Buck’s choice if he used the phrase “Jub Jub” during a World Series broadcast. “In this case, octopus is not only a word, it’s a good description of what we just saw. So I’m in on that if I can remember.”
The octopus awards: less demanding than Conan!
Godwin shouts out his teammates
While we happily add Jeopardy! to our running list of places the octopus has been mentioned (How do we get a Wikipedia page? Does somebody reach out??), Godwin and Ebguka clearly shared our moment of the year.
Godwin and I had a fun chat over Zoom about the team enjoying their opportunities to wear the throwback creamsicle unis, whether he has more fun lining up on the goal line or in a part of the field where he has more space to run, longtime teammate Mike Evans departing for San Francisco and more. You can check out the whole conversation at the top of this story or on SI’s YouTube channel.
This was the sixth consecutive year I caught up with the winner over the phone to congratulate them and discuss the achievement, with Godwin followingJerry Jeudy (2025),Tyler Lockett (’24),Jalen Hurts (’23),Mark Andrews (’22) andCam Akers (’21).
In years past, players have told me they’d be thinking about the octopus the next time they lined up for a two-point conversion, and I’ve always wondered if they were just humoring me. Now I know at least one player, Egbuka, had it in mind on the field. Of course, one figure who wasn’t in the Bucs’ social video was Mayfield.
“He’s on all of that kind of stuff,” Godwin assured me. “He’s a smart player, but he also is socially aware, like he knows what’s going on.”
So I did have to ask Godwin what his quarterback’s reaction would be if they were in the huddle before a two-point conversion and he asked Mayfield to hook him up for another score.
“On the field, I think he would react pretty good. He’d be like, I got you. But obviously he’s not gonna do something dumb just to try to get the octopus. Like if the play works out, then it works out. But he’s a good sport with all that kind of stuff.”
That sounds like a team that can boast two cowinners of our annual award.
“We’re grateful for our teammates, who obviously help us a ton,” Godwin said, on behalf of himself and Egbuka. “We don’t do this without them. So it’s a cool award, but we’re looking to do many, many [more] great things as well.”
And I am grateful for these Bucs teammates, too, along with their social media department, for now being ambassadors in our growing movement. (To accomplish what exactly? We’re still not sure.)
But I was looking back at some of my old octopus columns and found this gem, when imagining a future world filled with octopus references: “It would be fun to hear players talking about it while they’re mic’d up during a game.” That’s an actual sentence I typed out and published on July 23, 2020, and the NFL player population only made me wait half a decade. So who knows what the next five years have in store for us.
All-time octopus leaders
As mentioned above, Pro Football Reference now hasthe list of every octopus, so I don’t need to include it here. But every year I update both the list of players with multiple octopi in their career (no new updates this year) and the team totals (which saw the Buccaneers leapfrog the Bengals). Both leaderboards are below.
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MITCH GOLDICH
Mitch Goldich is a senior editor for Sports Illustrated, mostly focused on the NFL. He has also covered the Olympics extensively and written on a variety of sports since joining SI in 2014. His work has been published by The New York Times, Baseball Prospectus and Food & Wine, among other outlets. Goldich has a bachelor’s in journalism from Lehigh University and a master’s in journalism from the Medill School at Northwestern University. He is a Philly native, now living in Boston, and he invented and popularized the octopus, when the same player scores a touchdown and the ensuing two-point conversion.
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