Odell Beckham Jr. had just earned an improbable trip to the Super Bowl, and as he was interviewed on the NFC Championship game field, he delivered a short but bittersweet message to those he considered doubters and haters. Of course he did.
“I told you,” he screamed into a TV camera after his Los Angeles Rams beat the San Francisco 49ers.
“I told you,” he screamed again.
Yes, he told us. And this time around, Odell Beckham Jr. walked the talk.
He needed to commit a lot of unforced errors with the Giants and the Browns before he found a team, a coach, and a quarterback that could put him on the biggest stage in American sports. For starters, Beckham was the most talented receiver the Giants ever suited up, and it wasn’t close.
Thirty games deep into his career, Beckham stood as the fastest player in league history to rack up 200 receptions and 3,000 yards. But he had the damnedest time impacting the one thing that truly matters in the NFL — winning and losing. Before the Browns threw up their hands on OBJ, freeing him to sign with the Rams in November, Beckham had made a grand total of one career playoff start — a blowout loss at Green Bay defined by his infamous take-my-talents-to-South Beach boat trip before the game, by his virtual no-show during the game, and by his punchout of a Lambeau Field wall after the game.
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Five years later, the 29-year-old Beckham finally returned to the postseason, and finally found himself on a team too good to go one-and-done. The Rams took their home field at SoFi Stadium on Sunday night as the favorites to beat the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI. And no matter what the final score ultimately said about the forecasting abilities of Vegas oddsmakers, Beckham took the field with no good excuse to not perform.
He was no longer playing with an aging and declining Eli Manning, or with an underachieving Baker Mayfield. Beckham had a quarterback in Matthew Stafford who was still in his prime and who was trying to slap the ultimate exclamation point on a career year.
Beckham also had the benefit of running with the league’s best receiver, Cooper Kupp, who entered the Super Bowl with 2,333 receiving yards and 20 touchdowns in the regular season and postseason combined — numbers that demanded enough attention from any defense to give OBJ plenty of room to operate. On top of that, only half a dozen NFL teams struggled more against the pass in 2021 than the Bengals did.
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That’s why this matchup presented an ideal opportunity for Beckham to remind the world that he once made perhaps the most remarkable catch the game has ever seen — in a Giants loss (surprise, surprise) to Dallas in 2014 — and that he was once considered a slam-dunk Hall of Famer in the making. After helping Los Angeles beat the 49ers two weeks ago with his first performance of at least 100 receiving yards in 34 games, after declaring that L.A. “feels like a home” and that he’s willing to give up some money to stay there, Beckham had a rare forum to prove that he is indeed a money player.
Of equal consequence, a big game against Cincinnati would have gone a long way toward cleaning up past oil spills. Cleveland reached its breaking point with Beckham after his father shared an Instagram video showing Mayfield repeatedly missing the open receiver.
“One thing I’ve always been big on in my life is closure,” OBJ said the other day, “because I feel like if doors … [are] not closed, they’re always just still open.”
The Giants slammed the door shut on Beckham not even seven months after giving him a five-year, $95 million deal, a truth proving that general manager Dave Gettleman had no plan and no clue. It was a shame the Giants couldn’t manage OBJ’s high-maintenance ways, and that the receiver needlessly put his employer in position to bail on him, given that the team’s two-time Super Bowl-winning coach, Tom Coughlin, said that Beckham brought qualities to the field “the likes of which I’ve never seen.”
Beckham was always a different kind of football star. He grew up idolizing David Beckham, the soccer legend, and though he was a terror as a freshman JV quarterback at the Mannings’ New Orleans high school, Isidore Newman, he later surrendered the job to his friend, Ryan Brenner, because Brenner had been raised a quarterback and OBJ was concerned his friend wasn’t versatile enough to excel at another position.
In the end, Beckham was born to be a wide receiver anyway. He has the speed, the moves, the vision, and fingers that run as long as the 405. The Rams and Matthew Stafford were smart enough to play to all of his strengths.
So Sunday night at the Super Bowl, Odell Beckham Jr. would walk through the tunnel as part of a team he likes and a city he loves. He was in perfect position once again to scream, “I told you.”