DeAndre Hopkins is playing the free agency waiting game right now. With some spare time on his hands, the wide receiver took to Threads — Meta’s new Twitter-esque social media platform — to discuss his future retirement and why it isn’t coming anytime soon.
Hopkins’ lone condition? Dipping below a thousand receiving yards per season.
“I’ll retire from football when I’m not a 1k-yard receiver,” Hopkins said on Threads. “With that said, I was on pace for 1,400 yards last year—one significant injury in 11 years. I might be playing till I’m 37 the way I feel.”
DeAndre Hopkins says he will retire from football when he is not a 1000 yard receiver pic.twitter.com/DhlOqCP8cX
— NFL Rumors (@nflrums) July 6, 2023
Hopkins only managed to play in nine games last season for the Arizona Cardinals after missing the first six due to violating the NFL’s performance-enhancing drug policy. He tallied 717 receiving yards in the games he did play, which if extrapolated to a full 17-game season would mean he’d pull down 1,354 yards.
The 5-time Pro Bowl receiver was actually in a more precarious position in 2021 when he had just 572 yards through Week 14 before a knee injury wiped out his season. He would have needed to tally 107 yards in each of the last four games to breach the self-made threshold.
To his credit, Hopkins has averaged well over a thousand receiving yards per season — 1,129 to be exact — throughout his 10-year career thus far. While it’s conceivable that he manages to effectively play until his age-37 campaign, it likely won’t be as a WR1 posting a thousand-yard season.
Cardinals icon Larry Fitzgerald was 37 during his 17th and final NFL season, wherein he produced a career-low 409 receiving yards. 34-year-old Julio Jones has seen a steep decline every season since he led the NFL in receiving yards back in 2018. Jones finished with a career-low 299 yards across six games for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last season.
Before Hopkins has to worry about staving off retirement with another 1,000-yard season, figuring out what team he’ll play for next season should probably be higher up on the priority list.
