Davante Adams, the Receiver the Rams Nearly Traded and Now Lean On

Davante Adams

Photo: Kyle Engman / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 24, 1992 Palo Alto
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Pro Bowl (6×) · First-team All-Pro (3×) · NFL receiving touchdowns leader (3×) · Second-team All-American

The Los Angeles Rams spent part of their spring pricing a trade of Davante Adams. Moving him would have freed the cap room to chase Philadelphia’s A.J. Brown, until the Eagles’ asking price ended the conversation and Sean McVay said he expected his veteran receiver to stay. With Puka Nacua sidelined by a groin injury, Adams has since become the part of the Rams offence that still works. Expendable in the spring, indispensable by the autumn: his whole career has run on that loop.

No other player has led the NFL in touchdown catches for three different franchises. Adams did it with the Green Bay Packers, the Las Vegas Raiders and the Rams, and yet his stays keep ending before anyone planned. A standoff over the franchise tag closed his time in Green Bay. A trade request closed the Las Vegas years. The New York Jets released him after half a season.

He grew up in East Palo Alto, California, and crossed into neighbouring Palo Alto for high school. Davante Lavell Adams arrived on Christmas Eve 1992, the son of Douglas Adams and Pamela Brown, one of four children. At Palo Alto High School he played both ways, catching passes and covering receivers as a cornerback, and as a senior he helped the Vikings win a state championship. He was also a four-year letterman in basketball. The football offers came from Fresno State, Hawaii and San Diego State. He chose Fresno.

What happened there still reads like a typing error. After a redshirt year, Adams caught 102 passes for 1,312 yards and 14 touchdowns in 2012, then led the country in 2013 with 131 receptions, 1,719 yards and 24 touchdown catches, a Mountain West record and eight more than anyone else in the nation. His quarterback was Derek Carr. Adams was a second-team All-American and left after two seasons of play.

Green Bay took him in the second round of the 2014 draft, 53rd overall, and parked him behind Jordy Nelson and Randall Cobb. His first NFL touchdown was also Aaron Rodgers’ 200th touchdown pass, which proved to be an accurate forecast. The second season was a flop, 483 yards and a single score, and the Packers’ reply was patience. By 2016 he had 12 touchdowns. By the end of 2017 he had a first Pro Bowl, a frightening concussion from a helmet-to-helmet hit by Chicago’s Danny Trevathan, and a four-year, $58 million extension.

The Rodgers years that followed put Adams at the centre of the Packers offence, and the pair set the club record for completions between one passer and one receiver. In 2020 he caught 115 passes for 1,374 yards and 18 touchdowns, the most in a season since Randy Moss in 2007, and was named first-team All-Pro. In 2021 he set the franchise record with 1,553 yards and made the All-Pro first team again. Green Bay reached the NFC Championship Game four times with him and lost all four.

In March 2022 the Packers placed the franchise tag on him, and Adams told them he would not play under it. Days later he was traded to Las Vegas for a first- and a second-round pick and signed a five-year, $141.25 million contract that made him the best-paid receiver in the league at that moment. The move reunited him with Carr. His first Raiders season produced 100 catches, a club-record 1,516 yards and a league-leading 14 touchdowns.

That same autumn produced the worst moment of his career. Walking off the field after a 30-29 loss at Kansas City, Adams shoved Ryan Zebley, a freelance photographer working the Monday night broadcast, to the ground. Adams apologised and blamed his frustration over the finish, but Zebley was treated for whiplash and a possible concussion and went to the police, and Adams was charged with misdemeanour assault. Prosecutors dismissed the charge in June 2023; Zebley’s civil suit was settled in February 2025.

The other convenient story about Adams, that he moves to follow quarterbacks he trusts, is accurate, and it has not paid off. He landed with Carr in Las Vegas and, after a trade in October 2024, back with Rodgers at the Jets. Neither reunion reached the playoffs.

The Jets released him in March 2025, a season in which he still caught 85 passes for 1,063 yards and scored his 100th career touchdown. Five days later the Rams gave him a two-year deal worth $44 million to replace Cooper Kupp. Working with Matthew Stafford he caught only 60 passes in 2025, yet 14 of them were touchdowns, the most in the league, three of them in a single rout of Jacksonville in London. He also became the 17th player to reach 1,000 regular-season receptions. A hamstring injury against Detroit cost him the last three games, and he returned for the playoffs, winning twice before the Rams lost the NFC Championship Game 31-27 to Seattle, the fifth conference-final defeat of his career. Four catches, 89 yards and a touchdown did not change his reading of it: “It just sucks to come up short.”

The 2026 season opened badly, a 27-7 loss to San Francisco in Melbourne in which he caught three passes for 26 yards. Then came 195 yards and two touchdowns in a 28-6 win over the New York Giants, followed by seven catches for 137 yards in Denver, most of them against Pat Surtain II, the cornerback assigned to follow him. The 332 yards across those two games are the best back-to-back total of his career. The Rams still lost to the Broncos 30-26 after leading 16-0 at half-time and fell to 1-2 as the team many had picked to win the Super Bowl. “It’s nothing to freak out about,” Adams said.

He married Devanne Villarreal in 2018; the couple have three children and announced in April that a fourth is on the way. In 2024 he was one of the five pass-catchers followed by the Netflix series Receiver, alongside Justin Jefferson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, George Kittle and Deebo Samuel.

Adams is 33 and playing the final year of his Rams contract on an $18 million base salary, with no extension talks, according to McVay. The calendar he now works to is unusually personal. After Philadelphia on 4 October, the Rams visit the Raiders in Las Vegas on 25 October and host the Packers on 25 November. Two of his former teams will see him again before winter, and the club that nearly traded him in March has to decide whether he gets a second season in Los Angeles.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football, Los Angeles Rams, Davante Adams

Related People

Related People

Discussion