EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. — For more than a decade, Davante Adams has been one of football’s craftiest route runners. Last month, he made what he hopes will be one of the savviest and most consequential moves of his career.
After a 2024 season split between two flailing franchises, Adams took a sharp turn back to the left coast, signing a two-year, $46 million free-agent contract with the Los Angeles Rams. In the wake of dismal experiences with the Las Vegas Raiders and New York Jets, Adams was hell-bent on joining a stable organization accustomed to success — and affirming that he’s not a catalyst for toxicity.
“Well, first I’ve got to make sure it’s not me,” Adams said, smiling for effect, during an interview Friday in his hometown. “So, we’re going to get over there and see. If it gets dysfunctional, it means that I was the one making those organizations dysfunctional.”
Then, his expression turning serious, Adams added: “This is like true optimism versus just hoping. Obviously, knowing what I know about the management there, the players, the team success they’ve had in recent years and just over time … those are usually the type of teams that have stressed success. The most important thing was (joining) a good, winning team.”
Adams’ other major consideration in picking the Rams: “Geographic location.” At 32, the six-time Pro Bowl wide receiver wanted to be close to his extended family, and getting back to the Golden State carried added value.
In 2019, coming off a breakout season with the Green Bay Packers, Adams opened up to me about his scary upbringing in an economically challenged city surrounded by Silicon Valley opulence. As Adams put it then: “People hear ‘East Palo Alto’ and they think, ‘Oh, you’re from Stanford.’ They don’t understand. It’s like ‘The Lion King’: You’ve got Pride Rock, and then you’ve got where the hyenas are. It ain’t too far, but it’s a completely different world.”
On Friday, Adams visited the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Peninsula’s East Palo Alto Clubhouse, an impressive facility near and dear to his heart. He stood in the middle of the indoor court where he once honed his skills as a youth basketball standout and stressed the importance of academics, telling a large group of rapt students: “I wish I would have been a little more intentional about my studies and not let my grades slip instead of having to be a superhero in the classroom my last two years. It would have made my road a lot less bumpy. I was too focused on the final destination.”
A few minutes earlier, as we sat in an adjacent room, Adams had expressed excitement about what he hopes will be his fourth and last NFL stop: a Rams franchise a few hundred miles to the south that in January pushed the eventual Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles to the brink in a divisional-round playoff clash. Like the Packers, with whom Adams made six postseason appearances during an eight-year stint in green and gold, L.A. has been a perennial playoff participant since coach Sean McVay’s 2017 arrival, capturing a championship in its home stadium a little more than three years ago.
Adams, whose high salary-cap number led to his release by the Jets in early March, said he drew some degree of interest from nearly half the teams in the league, “which I was surprised about, to be honest with you.” The Rams — with McVay leading the way — were his most fervent pursuers.
“I felt like I was on a recruiting trip again,” said Adams, who had a record-setting career at Fresno State. “It felt like high school going off to college. It was a good feeling. That was the most wanted, I think, I’ve felt in my career.”
At the time, Adams was vacationing in Japan, meaning some of the text messages and phone calls he received — from McVay, Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford and others — came at odd hours.
“McVay is calling me, I’m out at a club and it’s like 3 a.m.,” Adams recalled. “I’m like, You know what? He’s like (39) years old. I can tell him (where I am).”
Adams felt connected to McVay because of a 2019 interaction at the Kentucky Derby, which came about six months after a 29-27 Rams victory over the Packers at the L.A. Coliseum — the infamous “Ty Montgomery Game” — in which Adams caught five passes for 133 yards.
“And he let me know how I gave him the blues in that game,” Adams recalled.
McVay’s candor resonated with Adams, who takes great pride in his craft — and takes umbrage with those he feels aren’t appreciative of his excellence. He once messaged Jalen Ramsey, a former Rams All-Pro cornerback now with the Miami Dolphins (and on the trading block), because of such a slight.
“I think it’s important for the players to talk about things as realistically as possible,” Adams said. “Which I had an issue with Jalen Ramsey (about) before because I knew based off what I did to him — and how he spoke to me about what I did to him — how he felt about my game. And then later that offseason, after we played him in the (2020) playoffs, he (went) on somebody’s podcast, and they said like name your top five (receivers) or whatever. And he named a bunch of dudes that weren’t me.
“And I even hit him up separately, like DM’d him, and I was like, ‘The f— is this?’ He was like, ‘No, it’s because I don’t have the same sample size with you as I do with some of these other guys.’”
Adams wasn’t moved by the explanation. However, a year later, Ramsey went on another podcast, got the same question and immediately mentioned Adams. By then, the receiver had another reason to feel slighted — by Packers management. Having placed the franchise tag on the All-Pro receiver, but reluctant to pay him at the top of the exploding market at the position, general manager Brian Gutekunst traded Adams to the Raiders for first- and second-round draft picks in March 2022.
Reunited with quarterback Derek Carr, his Fresno State teammate and good friend, Adams signed a five-year, $142.5 million contract and expressed excitement about playing for the team he rooted for as a kid. Despite catching 100 passes for 1,516 yards and 14 touchdowns, and earning first-team All-Pro honors for the third consecutive season, Adams came to regret the move. He felt blindsided when the Raiders, who’d given Carr a three-year, $121.5 million contract extension before the season, benched the QB with two games remaining in the 2022 season, telegraphing Carr’s eventual release.
“If I was Scooby-Doo,” Adams said, referencing the iconic cartoon, “I would’ve went, ‘Urrrrrrrrrrr?’ Like, you literally brought me here, you knew the reason why … me going there for Derek; everybody in the world knew that. And then to be in a situation where now you just pull him from me after we had a very productive year? That was the first kind of confused moment that I had.
“And then things continued that next year … obviously what they decided to do and some of the moves they decided to make on offense. And things continued the next year again. (Initially), I was trying to feel good about it, more than actually what I was presented with — just the facts of who’s the head coach, who’s my receiver coach, who is the offensive coordinator, who’s calling plays, what the defense looks like, all that stuff.
“Once we got to (2024), it was just a lot of the same. And it was just clear to me that we weren’t being set up to be put in a situation where we could really go and win at a convincing rate. And it was time for me to go.”
After requesting a trade in early October, Adams was shipped to the Jets, where four-time MVP quarterback Aaron Rodgers, with whom Adams has remained close since their time together in Green Bay, had lobbied for his acquisition. By the time Adams got onto the field in green and white, in an Oct. 20 defeat to the Pittsburgh Steelers that dropped New York to 2-5, the Jets were a mess, having already fired coach Robert Saleh two weeks earlier.
Adams, who still managed 67 receptions for 854 yards and seven touchdowns in 11 games with his new team, encountered plenty of dysfunction at his new place of employment. In an assessment he concedes is part “cockiness,” Adams insisted: “The leader in me likes to think that if I was there earlier, I could have had a bigger impact and maybe changed some things — just the morale of the team, getting guys used to winning and that different type of culture, just kind of shifting that a little bit earlier. But getting there Oct. 15th is not an ideal time to make too many changes.”
Any desire Adams might have had to remain with the Jets — something that would have required a contract restructure — was extinguished after Rodgers met with the team’s newly hired head coach (Aaron Glenn) and general manager (Darren Mougey) at the team’s training facility in February. As Rodgers recalled in a recent appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show,” Glenn quickly told him, “We’re going in a different direction.” The quarterback, who’d flown out for the meeting “on my own dime,” felt disrespected.
“We golfed together on a Wednesday in Vegas, at Shadow Creek, and then (Rodgers) told me he was going to (meet with the Jets) on Thursday and then come back and we’d play again Friday,” Adams recalled. “And he was just in such a bad mood (after the meeting) that he hit me up and was like, ‘I’m not coming back, bro.’ He’s like, ‘This was horrible; they just disrespected me completely.’
“I thought he was being a little dramatic at first. I’m like, ‘Bro, don’t paraphrase it. How did he say this?’ (But) that’s how he said it. And I was shocked because I didn’t think anybody had the balls to, for lack of better words, to hit him with it like that. Just flat out — ‘Yeah, I think we’re just gonna do something different. We’re gonna move in a different direction.’ It was shocking, but right from that moment, I knew there was no chance that I’d be back there.”
Once released, Adams assessed his options. Some teams that reached out to his agent — such as the San Francisco 49ers, whose training facility is a short drive from East Palo Alto — weren’t nearly as motivated as the Rams.
“I was entertaining the Niners,” Adams said, “but they were like, ‘We’re paying wholesale. We ain’t paying retail.’ I didn’t talk to them, but that’s what my agent told me — like five times, that quote. And I was like, ‘OK, well, I’m not a wholesale-type dude.’”
That’s based on Adams’ conviction that he has retained the skills that helped take him to the top of his profession. Asked whether he believes he’s in his prime, Adams replied, “Well, I think that’s a great question — and I think I can tell you that my prime has been since 2018, and I truly feel like I’m playing equal or better ball.
“I haven’t lost any speed — which, you know, I didn’t come into the league as a burner, so people weren’t looking to see a 4.2 (40-yard dash) turn into 4.5. I was high 4.4s coming in, and I’m running the same speeds now. Whether it’s the GPS, or if I could line up and run a 40 right now, I’d probably run a faster 40 than I ran when I was 21 years old. And obviously, I mean, the proof is in the pudding. I don’t need to tell you what I can still do or not.”
In 2025 and beyond, Adams plans to show it, and not in a subtle manner. With McVay calling the plays, Stafford throwing the ball and third-year wideout Puka Nacua — a revelation since earning second-team All-Pro honors as a rookie — occupying plenty of attention, Adams aims to wreak havoc on opposing secondaries.
As Adams sees it, whether he and Nacua rate as the NFL’s top receiving tandem is out of their hands — except when it comes to the opinions of the people trying to cover them.
“It doesn’t matter if we have a thousand more yards combined than the next duo — nobody’s ever gonna agree,” Adams said. “That’s not my goal, to try to be on any list or any of that stuff. But at the end of the day, I can guarantee you: You want to circle back, and whether it’s top 100s or talking to the opposition? They’ll tell you.
“Look, my responsibility is to just put it on tape and then let people feel me from whatever I do on the field, and then go from there. And I know Puka is the same way. He’s not worried about, ‘I’ve got to hit this yard marker,’ or, ‘I’ve got to have this many touchdowns.’ He’s gonna go out there and he’s gonna give you the blues and he’s gonna be blocking the s— out of you, doing whatever he’s got to do to make you feel him. So, there are gonna be two of those guys out there.”
That’s the vision, and the stakes aren’t insignificant. After three years of trafficking in dysfunction, Adams is challenging himself to bring that vision to life — and to change the direction of his career arc.
(Top photo: Bryan Bennett / Getty Images)
