It’s that time of year again. Welcome back to The MMQB’s most self-indulgent, what-we-can-now-call-yearly honors: the Second Annual Octopus Awards.
For those of you who are new around here, we should play a bit of catch-up. In 2019, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the NFL’s adoption of the two-point conversion, I introduced the octopus. As I’ve written previously—and will spend the rest of my life copying and pasting—an octopus is when the same player who scores a touchdown also scores the ensuing two-point conversion. No, being a quarterback and throwing the ball for a TD does not count. You must be the one who secures the ball in the end zone on both plays.
I suggest reading the original column from 2019, which includes all kinds of fun facts and historical nuggets from an era before anyone started tracking such things. You can follow that up with last year’s awards column, which lays out the story of how the octopus went from a thing I tweeted about once to a thing Caesars had “high six-figures” riding on during Super Bowl LIV.
Great, now that you’ve done your summer reading, let’s once again look back at some great moments in recent—by which I mean the 2020 season—octopus history. And stay till the end, because before we finish with an update of the all-time individual and team leader boards, I have a surprise. (Spoiler alert: I spoke to the player who won Octopus of the Year. That’s the surprise. I talked to him about the octopus. Please get to the bottom to see what he said, but let me tease this out and build to the payoff.)
