Bengals
Randy Moss caught 23 touchdown passes for the 2007 New England Patriots, a single-season record that has stood for nearly two decades without a serious challenger. This week, Ja'Marr Chase said he intends to challenge it. "Let's say 23 touchdowns, not 22, 23. I want to break the record with that," the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver said on SiriusXM NFL Radio.
That pursuit begins Sunday, in Week 1, against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Before it becomes a story about history, it is a story about whoever lines up across from Chase on Sunday afternoon at Paycor Stadium.
What Chase is chasing
Moss set his record in a Patriots offense built around getting him the ball deep, with Tom Brady throwing in a 16-0 regular season. No receiver has caught more than 20 touchdown passes in a season since. Chase's goal of 22 or 23 this year would match or break a mark that has survived the arrival of nearly every great receiver of the last generation, including Justin Jefferson, Davante Adams and Tyreek Hill.
Chase has the recent burst to make the number plausible. In 2024, he led the NFL in catches (127), receiving yards (1,708) and touchdowns (17), becoming the fifth player in the Super Bowl era to win the receiving triple crown, and earned first-team All-Pro honors. That season is the baseline for anyone taking his 2026 target seriously.
The 2025 season, though, was a reminder of how much of any receiver's touchdown count depends on his quarterback. With Joe Burrow missing significant time to injury, Chase still caught 125 passes for 1,412 yards in 16 games, but managed only 8 touchdowns. He enters 2026 with 520 catches, 6,837 receiving yards and 54 receiving touchdowns in five seasons since Cincinnati made him the fifth overall pick in the 2021 draft out of LSU.
The gap between 2024's 17 touchdowns and 2025's 8 is the whole case against Chase reaching 23: it is less a talent question than a health and opportunity question, tied directly to how much Burrow plays and how the Bengals use their passing game in the red zone. For more on Burrow's own return to full health this season, see BucsWorld's look at Sunday's two No. 1 overall picks.
Who actually covers him
Tampa Bay's Week 1 depth chart, released September 9, lists Zyon McCollum as the starting cornerback opposite Jacob Parrish, with second-year player Benjamin Morrison as McCollum's primary backup and rookie Keionte Scott behind Parrish. Antoine Winfield Jr. and Tykee Smith start at the two safety spots, full details at the Bucs' depth chart.
It is a young group. McCollum, a fifth-round pick in 2022, is the senior cornerback in his fifth season; Parrish and Morrison were both drafted in 2025 and are entering their second. Winfield Jr., the most established piece of the secondary, offers Bowles a way to disguise where extra help comes from, rotating him down into the box or over the top depending on the look Chase draws before the snap.
Cincinnati is not sending Chase out there alone. Tee Higgins caught a career-high 11 touchdowns in 2025, finishing with 59 receptions for 846 yards in 15 games. A defense that commits extra attention to Chase has to do it knowing Higgins is the release valve on the other side, a problem Tampa Bay cannot solve by simply doubling one receiver.
How Bowles has handled this kind of test
Todd Bowles' defense enters 2026 still working through the aftermath of a 2025 pass defense that allowed 238.2 passing yards per game, as BucsWorld detailed in the Todd Bowles defense, by the numbers. That piece also documented Bowles' own diagnosis of the problem: in September, he said the defense still needs "two corners who can really play," a rare public admission of where the room fell short.
The scheme itself is built around disguised pressure and rotating coverage rather than one shutdown corner shadowing a receiver all game. In that picture, Winfield Jr. is the extra eye over the top, McCollum or Parrish take Chase in single coverage depending on the formation, and the safety help slides toward whichever side Chase splits out on. Whether disguise can do the job that individual cornerback talent did not in 2025 is the question that piece leaves open, and Sunday is the first answer.
What Sunday actually tells us
A single Week 1 performance will not settle whether Chase reaches 23 touchdowns in January, and it will not fully answer whether Tampa Bay's revamped cornerback room is ready for a full season of matchups like this one. But it will tell us something narrower and still useful: whether a defense that spent an offseason retooling its cornerback room can generate real pressure on Burrow and contest Chase's routes without collapsing coverage elsewhere, exactly the trade-off BucsWorld flagged as the biggest storyline heading into the opener.
If Chase goes off, catching multiple touchdowns against single coverage or getting behind Tampa Bay's safeties for a chunk play, it confirms exactly what worried analysts about this secondary all offseason: unproven talent facing an established star in his own building. If Tampa Bay holds him to modest numbers without surrendering big plays to Higgins instead, it is real evidence, not just an offseason talking point, that the retooled cornerback room can hold up against the best. Either way, Chase's pursuit of Randy Moss' record starts on Sunday, and Tampa Bay's young secondary is the first name on the list.
No comments yet. Start the conversation.