Almost immediately after watching Odell Beckham Jr. pull off the one-handed catch against which all others are measured, six-year-old Ty Plinski began trying to imitate it.

He turned his family's high-ceilinged living room in suburban Southern California into his own version of MetLife Stadium.

"I had my parents throw a bean bag up in the air and I'd go dive for it with one hand," Plinski said. "I would always pretend that I was OBJ."

As he grew older and became even more obsessed with football, Plinski kept training for situations when a defender pinned one of his arms or when he needed to extend his catch radius to snare an off-target throw. He and his friends would take turns rifling passes at each other and trying to pluck them out of the air one-handed. Or he'd lie flat on his back, throw a football high in the air and practice adjusting his body to snatch it with either hand.

The payoff for Plinski's years of preparation finally came in late August when Corona Centennial opened the 2025 high school football season against Servite. The 6-foot-3 Plinski claimed the No. 1 spot in SportsCenter's top plays that night with a fully extended Beckham-esque one-handed touchdown catch in the back right corner of the end zone.

"I've been making catches like that my whole life, but they've been with my brother or my friends in the backyard," Plinski said. "It was super cool to have it finally happen during a game when it was broadcast for people to see."

The story behind Plinski's extraordinary grab exemplifies how the art of catching a football has evolved over the past quarter century. Spectacular one-handed catches have become a staple of the modern game thanks to the advent of grip-enhancing receiver gloves, the influence of Beckham’s iconic catch and the desire of young receivers to master a technique once dismissed as needlessly flashy.

It's difficult to quantify exactly how much more common one-handed catches are now across all levels of football, but anecdotal evidence suggests they're not nearly as rare as they used to be even a decade ago. The most audacious one-handed catches aren't just coming from household names like Justin Jefferson, Garrett Wilson or DeAndre Hopkins. This season's most ridiculous catches originate from further off the radar.

College football's one-handed catch of the year might be this dazzling, fully extended grab from Miami's CJ Daniels, a sixth-year senior who spent his first four collegiate seasons at Liberty. 

Or maybe it's this leaping catch to spoil a shutout from Villanova's Brandon Binkowski, a redshirt freshman who did not have any scholarship offers from power-conference programs.

This season's most dazzling one-handed catch at any level could be this interception last Friday by Lone Peak High School's Kennan Pula, a three-star prospect who committed to Utah over the summer. Or it might be the August touchdown catch by Plinski, whose only offer as recently as September came from Ottawa University of Surprise, Arizona.

Why are unheralded high school or college prospects now making one-handed catches reminiscent of the one that rocketed Beckham to prominence? Interviews with receivers, coaches, glove manufacturers and others reveal a multi-faceted answer but one that starts with the evolution of receiver gloves.

“I don't believe you would see great catches with no gloves on,” said Saranac CEO Dan Small, whose company manufactures Adidas football gloves.

Ryan Kang via Getty Images

The birth of the modern superglove

Fifty years ago, the NFL's most sure-handed receivers didn't have high-tech gloves to assist with difficult catches. When they sought a competitive catching advantage, they slathered a thick, gluey adhesive known as Stickum all over their hands and forearms.

Stickum is especially synonymous with the outlaw mystique of the Oakland Raiders of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dark-yellow paste practically dripped off defensive back Lester Hayes when he racked up a league-high 13 interceptions in 1980. Fred Biletnikoff smeared so much on his hands that the team’s equipment manager used to manually feed the Hall of Fame receiver his chewing game on the sidelines.

In 1981, the NFL grew tired of the mess Stickum left behind. The league enacted the so-called Lester Hayes rule, outlawing “adhesive or slippery substances” if they stuck to the football and created problems for players trying to handle or throw it.

Almost immediately, receivers began hunting for a substitute for Stickum, but manufacturers struggled to recreate its grip-enhancing qualities in glove form. Early football gloves were plain and bulky. They lacked the sleek fit or grip boost of today’s options. As Hall of Fame receiver James Lofton told ESPN in 2015, the football gloves of the 1980s and early 1990s “really looked like they came from Home Depot.”

Around that time, Neumann gained widespread popularity by selling treated leather football gloves with “tackified” fingers and palms. The coating that Neumann applied to the gloves was so sticky that the national governing body for high school sports became concerned. In 1992, the NFHS tasked the Sports and Fitness Industry Association with creating the first standard for how sticky football gloves could be.

“The NFHS people used to call those the Toyota gloves,” former SFIA vice president Gregg Hartley told Yahoo Sports. "They thought you could pick up a Toyota with them.”

The birth of the modern superglove can be traced to a freak injury suffered by a little-known University of Ottawa receiver in 1996. Jeff Beraznik hyperextended a finger and tore multiple tendons when attempting to catch a football during fall camp.

Doctors recommended that Beraznik wear gloves after he recovered, but he didn’t like any of the ones that he found in stores. The previous season, Beraznik had noticed University of Calgary receiver Don Blair catching punts one-handed while wearing a pair of orange-brown gloves. The University of Calgary equipment manager told Beraznik that Blair was wearing industrial gloves used by glass cutters and glass handlers.

“I contacted the company that made these gloves,” Beraznik told Yahoo Sports. “They sent me a box and I brought them to practice. Everyone laughed at me, but by the end of the season, our whole team was wearing them. Not only because they had very good thermal properties, they also had very good grip.”

Word spread quickly among the football community that Beraznik was modifying glass-cutting gloves to make grippier gloves for receivers. Before long, Beraznik had voicemails on his home answering machine from NFL receivers eager to give his gloves a try.

Hoping to turn his hobby into a business, Beraznik began a worldwide search after college to find a chemical manufacturer who could help him engineer the ideal material. When the best sample came from a lab outside Karachi, Pakistan, Beraznik racked up frequent flyer mileage working with chemists there to refine a high-friction synthetic compound that provided improved grip in all weather conditions.

The resulting C-Tack technology was different from anything else on the market at the time. The grippiness didn’t come from a post-application coating like other gloves. It was integrated into the palms and fingers of the glove itself.

“We were able to get a very strong following among top NFL receivers,” said Beraznik, who named his brand of gloves “Cutters” as an homage to the glass-cutting gloves that provided the inspiration for his product. “Even though a lot of NFL receivers had Nike contracts and Reebok contracts at the time, they were going to the extent of sewing Nike swooshes onto our gloves. Everyone would think they were wearing Nike, but they were really wearing Cutters.”

While Beraznik says he purposefully dropped his patent application to avoid having to reveal how C-Tack was engineered, he couldn’t hold off his deep-pocketed competitors forever. Eventually, Nike, Adidas and Under Armour learned to use silicone or other polymers to produce grippy gloves similar to those that Cutters popularized.

By 2014, the most popular gloves on the market provided roughly the same enhanced grip as those for sale today.

The conditions were ripe for a sublimely talented receiver to seize the moment and redefine what was possible.

The catch that shocked the world

Believe it or not, Odell Beckham Jr. actually botched the iconic play that catapulted him to superstardom.

The New York Giants rookie was supposed to run an out and up, but he rushed the route and failed to properly sell the double move. As a result, Dallas Cowboys cornerback Brandon Carr was still running stride for stride with him down the sideline as they tracked the flight of Eli Manning’s deep ball.

With Carr using his body to lean on Beckham and push him toward the sideline, Beckham deftly slowed down and sped up again to get the cornerback off balance. Carr drew a flag grabbing Beckham’s jersey in a desperate attempt to stay in contact, but by then the receiver was already contorting his body backward, extending his supersized 10-inch right hand behind his head and plucking the ball out of the New Jersey sky.

Beckham’s outrageous one-handed — check that, three-fingered — 43-yard touchdown catch instantly became an indelible moment. On NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcast, a dumbfounded Cris Collinsworth famously declared, “That may be the greatest catch I've ever seen in my life.” Sports luminaries who reacted on social media were equally awestruck.

Only Beckham himself downplayed his accomplishment.

“I hope it's not the greatest catch of all time,” he said after the game. “I hope I can make more."

Highlight-reel one-handed grabs have been a part of NFL football dating back to Max McGee's touchdown catch in Super Bowl I, but none have resonated quite like Beckham’s did. Between the degree of difficulty, the Sunday Night Football stage and the rise of social media, the impact was unprecedented.

Beckham’s No. 13 jersey rocketed up the list of the NFL’s top sellers. His face graced the cover of Madden NFL 16. His signature bleached-blonde hairstyle became a trendsetter. And above all else, kids across America who watched his legendary play instantly became disinterested in working on catching a football with two hands.

The day after Beckham’s signature catch, Kyle Steele witnessed its influence. The New Jersey youth football coach and middle school teacher recalls boys and girls as young as 5 years old arching their backs and stretching their fingers while feebly attempting to duplicate Beckham’s display of athleticism.

“It didn’t matter if it was a football, a bag of chips or a wadded up piece of paper,” Steele told Yahoo Sports. “They were trying to catch it with one hand.”

Before November 23, 2014, Steele said it was unusual to see an attempted one-handed catch by a youth football player in the Irvington Golden Knights program. After Beckham’s catch, according to Steele, “kids started trying it immediately.”

The way Steele sees it, Beckham changed the perception of the one-handed catch the same way that Stephen Curry did for the long-distance 3-pointer. Even old-school coaches must acknowledge that both can be an essential tool in a modern player’s arsenal.

“Odell altered the way the game is played,” Steele said. “That’s his legacy.”

Al Bello via Getty Images

Is it all about the gloves?

As one-handed catches became a bigger part of football after Beckham’s catch, the debate over the role that technology played in his viral moment also intensified. Beckham faced questions about whether he could have snagged Manning’s pass without the red-and-white XXL Nike Vapor Jet 3.0 gloves he was wearing.

"The gloves definitely help, but that's part of the game," Beckham told reporters at the time. "You're allowed to wear gloves. They're not against the rules."

Estimates vary for exactly how much assistance receivers get by wearing gloves. In 2019, MIT researchers found that receiver gloves are 20% stickier than the human hand. That might even undersell it, says Ryan Siskey, vice president of Exponent Labs, the lab hired by the SFIA to test the tackiness of football gloves. Siskey told Yahoo Sports his “back of the envelope estimation” is that modern gloves are “2 to 3 times stickier than the human hand.”

Glove manufacturers seeking the SFIA’s seal of approval must demonstrate that their product is compliant with the organization’s performance standards. An independent, third-party lab puts sample gloves through a coefficient of friction test and a peel adhesion test to ensure their level of tackiness falls within the legal limits and doesn’t provide an unfair competitive advantage.

While the governing bodies of Pop Warner, high school and college football only allow players to wear SFIA-certified gloves during game play, the NFL has no such formal requirement. The league permits all gloves with a tackified surface as long as that substance “does not adhere to the football or otherwise cause handling problems for players.”

Asked why the NFL does not have a formal rule governing how sticky gloves can be, league spokesman Brian McCarthy told Yahoo Sports, “This has not been an issue that rises to the level of setting an exact standard.”

“If an official feels the ball is sticky following a catch or sees blades of grass sticking on the glove, he or she may examine the gloves,” McCarthy added. “The league also works with manufacturers who know there would be repercussions if the gloves they provide players would be a violation.”

With manufacturers bumping up against the SFIA limitations on tackiness, Small, the Adidas glove supplier, suspects that most receiver gloves on the market these days “probably fall within a very similar grip category.”

Adidas and other manufacturers have innovated in other ways over the past decade, from a more spandex-like second-skin fit, to the use of more breathable fabrics, to maximizing the surface area of grippy material on the palms and fingers.

There may not be much difference in grip between different models of gloves, but that doesn’t stop NFL receivers from going to great lengths in search of even the slightest competitive advantage. Many wear a fresh pair of gloves every game. Some change gloves after every series or every quarter. The most superstitious will trade out their gloves anytime they drop a pass.

Siskey has heard tales of NFL receivers ordering truckloads of gloves and “having teams of people to sift through them to find the ones that have certain characteristics.” Hartley recalls manufacturers specially producing gloves that hadn’t been on the market for years for NFL receivers who swear by that particular model.

Says Hartley with a laugh, “Because the pros get their product for free, they can take advantage of the situation.”

For all the emphasis on gloves, even manufacturers admit that they’ve only played a small part in the recent one-handed catch phenomenon. As Small puts it, “The progression of the athletes’ ability and training has had as much or more to do with it.”

Many of the receivers who were inspired by Beckham’s catch as kids are now finishing high school or making an impact at the college level. Among those is Pula, who says he and his twin brother watched Beckham’s catch on their seventh birthday and made working on one-handed catches part of their pregame routine soon after.

Last Friday, Pula did his best impersonation of Beckham when he hauled in a one-handed Spiderman-esque interception in the state semifinals. Much to the University of Utah signee’s surprise, ex-Dallas Cowboys star Dez Bryant quote-tweeted the video, tagged Beckham and wrote, “Look at this bruh.”

“When my friend sent that to me, I was like, ‘That’s pretty crazy,’” Pula said. “OBJ was the one who started it all.”