Alvin Kamara, the Saints record-holder who took a pay cut to stay home

Alvin Kamara

Photo: EuphoricOrca / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 25, 1995 Norcross
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	AP NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year · Pro Bowl · Second-team All-Pro

There is a play Alvin Kamara has run for a decade, and it rarely looks like much when it starts. A short pass to the flat, a defender closing, a gain that ought to die near the line. Then a stutter, a cut back against the flow, and the ball carrier is somewhere nobody planned for him to be. Against the New York Giants this month that play ended in the end zone, and it put Kamara in a club of six.

The awkward part is the setting. He scored as the second running back on the depth chart of the team whose record book he owns, playing on a contract he agreed to shrink so he could stay. For a player who spent his college years being told there was no room for him, it is a familiar position, and he has rarely accepted the verdict.

The road started in Norcross, the suburb north-east of Atlanta where Kamara was born on July 25, 1995, to a Liberian mother. As a senior at Norcross High School he ran for 2,264 yards and 26 touchdowns, carried the school to its first state title and was named Georgia’s Mr. Football. Alabama won the recruiting fight, and that is where the straight line ended.

Knee surgery cost him the preseason in Tuscaloosa, and a backfield with Derrick Henry, T.J. Yeldon and Kenyan Drake ahead of him left a redshirt year as the only option. Nick Saban then barred him from practice over what the program called behavioral issues and kept him out of the bowl game. Kamara left for Hutchinson Community College in Kansas, ran for 1,253 yards and 18 touchdowns in nine games, and returned to the SEC with Tennessee. In Knoxville he shared the ball with Jalen Hurd and started only eight of 24 games, although one afternoon at Texas A&M produced a school-record 312 all-purpose yards.

NFL teams read that split workload as a warning. Kamara posted the highest Wonderlic score among running backs at the 2017 Combine and still lasted until the third round, where New Orleans traded up to take him 67th overall. His rookie season reads like a correction to the whole draft: 728 rushing yards, 826 receiving yards and 6.07 yards per carry, the best average ever by a rookie running back with at least 100 attempts. He and Mark Ingram II became the first backfield pair in league history to each pass 1,500 yards from scrimmage, and Kamara was named the AP Offensive Rookie of the Year.

With Drew Brees at quarterback and Sean Payton calling plays, he became the model for a kind of back the league now hunts for, a runner who can split out wide and beat a linebacker there. He made the Pro Bowl in each of his first five seasons, a first in Saints history, and was twice a second-team All-Pro. The signature afternoon came on Christmas Day 2020 against Minnesota, when he ran for 155 yards and six touchdowns, tying an NFL single-game record. He led the league with 21 total touchdowns that year, a season that opened with a five-year, $75 million extension.

The record book is only half the file. On Pro Bowl weekend in Las Vegas in February 2022, Kamara was arrested after a beating at a nightclub; surveillance video showed him punching a man repeatedly. The felony charge was dropped when he pleaded no contest in July 2023 to a misdemeanor breach of the peace, paid restitution toward the victim’s medical bills and agreed to community service. The NFL suspended him for three games. That episode sits uneasily beside the image New Orleans prefers, the candid, playful star who owns a juice chain called Big Squeezy and advises NASCAR on reaching new fans. There is a quieter critique too, written in the numbers: after four seasons averaging well above four and a half yards per carry, he has hovered around four ever since, and his best veteran years came from volume and hands rather than burst.

None of that stopped the accumulation. In 2023 he passed Marques Colston as the franchise’s career touchdown leader. In October 2024 the Saints gave him a two-year, $24.5 million extension, and a month later, against Atlanta, he passed Ingram for the most rushing yards in club history. The body was less cooperative. A groin injury ended his 2024 season early, and a sprained MCL in 2025 cost him the final six games of a year that produced career lows, with 471 rushing yards and a single touchdown.

The bill arrived this year. In March the Saints signed Travis Etienne to a four-year, $52 million contract, and general manager Mickey Loomis spoke in May of a “resource management element” to keeping Kamara on the roster. In July he agreed to restructure the final season of his deal, reported at a $6 million base salary plus incentives. His agent, Bradley Cicala, told the Associated Press that his goal was to remain with the Saints. The new terms did not rule out a trade, and a knee sprain in training camp briefly put the start of his season in doubt.

Under head coach Kellen Moore he has turned into something closer to a specialist, used more as a receiver than as a runner. On October 18 at MetLife Stadium, the 31-yard catch-and-run from Tyler Shough in a 34-27 win over the Giants pushed him past 5,000 career receiving yards to go with more than 5,000 rushing, a pairing reached before him only by Marshall Faulk, Lenny Moore, Marcus Allen, Tiki Barber and Christian McCaffrey. A week later the Saints played the first NFL regular-season game in France and lost 16-10 to Pittsburgh at the Stade de France. Kamara, who led the Who Dat chant with Cameron Jordan before kickoff, carried six times for five yards and caught all seven passes thrown his way for 57.

New Orleans sits at 2-5, with a bye before a game against Cleveland, and his contract ends with this season. What Kamara decides after that will rest on whether a back built for open space can keep making a smaller job look like the old one, one short pass at a time.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, Sean Payton, New Orleans Saints, Alvin Kamara, American football players, Drew Brees

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