Amon-Ra St. Brown, the Lions Receiver Who Still Counts the Sixteen Picked Before Him

Amon-Ra St. Brown

Photo: FanDuel / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 24, 1999 Anaheim Hills
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	First-team All-Pro · Second-team All-Pro · Pro Bowl · NFL Offensive Rookie of the Month

Most players stop thinking about draft night once the contract is signed. Amon-Ra St. Brown built a career on refusing to. Ask the Detroit Lions wide receiver and he will still recite the sixteen receivers chosen before him, a list he has followed with pen and paper, week after week, against his own production. The grudge is part show and part method, and it is the most useful key to a player who became one of the most dependable pass catchers in the league without ever being the fastest man on the field.

The stubbornness was raised at home. His father, John Brown, was a bodybuilder who twice won the amateur Mr. Universe title and expected his sons to become athletes; his mother, Miriam, came to California from Leverkusen, in Germany. The boys grew up in Anaheim Hills speaking English, German and French, with names taken from Egyptian mythology. Amon-Ra is named after Amun-Ra, the sun god of Thebes. Even the surname was a plan: the father registered his children as St. Brown because there were, in his view, too many plain Browns on the backs of jerseys.

All three brothers played receiver. Equanimeous reached the NFL with Green Bay and Chicago, Osiris played at Stanford, and Amon-Ra, born on October 24, 1999, moved from Servite to Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana. As a senior in 2017 he caught 72 passes for 1,320 yards and 20 touchdowns, and he arrived at USC as a five-star recruit ranked second among receivers in his class. He holds both American and German citizenship.

At USC he produced from the first snap, with seven catches and a touchdown against UNLV in his debut. He finished his freshman year with 60 receptions, passed 1,000 yards as a sophomore and scored seven touchdowns in the six games of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. Projections for the 2021 draft ranged from the late first round to the fourth. Detroit took him in the fourth round, 112th overall, after a run of receivers whose names he can still give in order.

He joined a team that had stopped winning. The Lions were 0-10-1 when they hosted Minnesota in December 2021, and with four seconds left Jared Goff found St. Brown for his first career touchdown and the club’s first victory in almost a year. He was named NFL Offensive Rookie of the Month for December and finished with 90 catches and 912 yards, a franchise record for a rookie receiver.

The next three seasons turned the late pick into the center of the offense. In 2022 he became the first player in NFL history to string together six regular-season games with at least eight receptions and a touchdown, and he reached 1,000 yards younger than any Lion before him, eight days younger than Calvin Johnson had been. In 2023 he caught 119 passes for 1,515 yards, third in the league, earned first-team All-Pro honors and posted 110 yards in the wild-card win over the Rams that gave Detroit its first playoff victory in more than three decades. Netflix followed that season in Receiver, the docuseries in which he shared the screen with Davante Adams, Justin Jefferson, Deebo Samuel and George Kittle. In April 2024 the Lions signed him to a four-year, $120 million extension that runs through 2028, and he answered with 115 catches, 12 touchdowns and a second first-team All-Pro selection.

The numbers also feed a doubt that has followed him since college. His yards per catch rarely climb much above eleven or twelve, the profile of a receiver who wins on timing, toughness after the catch and Goff’s trust rather than on pure separation down the field. In an offense designed around him, that kind of production is easy to admire and easy to discount. His competitive edge has a harder side too. In November 2025, Washington defensive lineman Daron Payne punched him during a 44-22 Detroit win and was suspended for one game. St. Brown called the earlier contact a scuffle and admitted nothing, but footage that surfaced days later showed him striking Payne’s facemask first, with no flag thrown. The league fined him $12,172, and the gap between the two penalties drew criticism. The tireless worker people like to picture is not the whole player.

His own numbers in 2025 held up, with 117 catches, 1,401 yards, 11 touchdowns, a second-team All-Pro nod and a fourth straight Pro Bowl, but the Lions finished 9-8 and missed the playoffs. “I feel we have that edge. I’m not saying we ever lost it, but I feel it’s back,” he said in training camp in August. The first half of 2026 has supported him. Detroit is 6-2, he caught nine passes for 153 yards in the 20-17 win over Green Bay, and on November 8 in Miami, after a rib injury limited him in practice all week, he caught eight passes for 86 yards in a 19-9 win. That leaves him at 61 receptions, 657 yards and five touchdowns through eight games.

Away from the field he co-hosts the St. Brown Podcast with Equanimeous, and the three brothers run the St. Brown Foundation, which funds literacy, travel and health programs for students. “Not everyone’s going to be a professional athlete and not everyone is gonna make it to college,” he has said of that work.

His next stop carries more meaning than most road trips. On November 15, the Lions face the New England Patriots at Bayern Munich’s stadium, a home game for Detroit played in his mother’s country, with family in the stands. “Me being half-German, I feel like it’s my duty to kind of grow the game in Germany,” he said. The receiver who still keeps count of the sixteen will have a different kind of crowd watching him in Munich.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football, Davante Adams, Detroit Lions, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jared Goff

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