Davante Adams Journey
Posted: 01 Dec 2021 10:07
Davante Adams started screaming.
“I hate football!”
It was November 2015, and he was at the wheel, driving home from Lambeau Field with his mom. Pamela Brown was startled by his outburst.
“Don’t say that!” Brown said. “No you don’t!”
She had flown from California to Green Bay to watch her son play the Bears. Adams’ wife, Devanne, was there, and so was her mom. Aaron Rodgers targeted Adams a team-high 11 times on that rainy night, but he caught only two passes for 14 yards. The Bears won 17-13.
“Yes I do!”
When they arrived back at Adams’ house, he retreated to his room and didn’t come out. Brown brought him a plate of food and left him alone. She was shocked, if only because her son hadn’t yet opened up to her about how his second season in the NFL, a personal disaster, was weighing on him.
It was the injuries. The drops. The lack of production. He was thrust into the No. 1 role following Jordy Nelson’s preseason ACL tear, but he sprained his ankle in Week 2. Adams re-aggravated the injury the following week, missed three games, then played through pain after he returned. This Thanksgiving night game, which Adams still calls the worst game of his career, was the tipping point.
He admits now that he paid too much attention to what people wrote about him online. He remembers fans wanting him gone, the Twitter hashtags calling for 2014 seventh-rounder Jeff Janis to take his place. After a regular season in which he caught just 50 passes for 483 yards with a career-low one touchdown catch and a career-high 10 drops, he finished the year by tearing his MCL in a divisional-round win against Washington.
“It was definitely a sad time in my career,” Adams tells The Athletic.
Two years prior, Adams amassed 24 touchdown catches at Fresno State — eight more than anyone else in college football. He was second in the nation with 1,719 receiving yards. That was enough to be selected in the second round of the 2014 draft after his redshirt sophomore season.
“I was so used to doing what I was doing in college,” he says. “Go and score literally two touchdowns a game, putting up monster numbers, just having a great time.”
This failure was foreign, but Adams had navigated worse.
When he’s introduced as Davante Adams from Palo Alto, he interjects.
It’s East Palo Alto. Not the east part of Palo Alto, which is what people think he means, but a city entirely its own in California’s Bay Area.
When thinking about the two cities, “The Lion King” provides a helpful comparison, Adams says. Palo Alto — synonymous with Silicon Valley and extreme wealth and home to Stanford University and Tesla — is like Pride Rock.
East Palo Alto is like the Elephant Graveyard. That is where he’s from.
“It’s not too far away,” Adams says. “But it’s two totally different worlds.”
After a long pause and a deep breath, he continues: “It’s tough talking about it.” One of his best friends was killed. He witnessed drive-by shootings. Brown wouldn’t let him leave the house unless he had a specific destination, not even if he just wanted to play outside.
“Knowing where we were from, I just refused for my kid to be another statistic,” Brown says. “East Palo Alto was always like the underdog city. It was a lot of gang violence. It was a lot of drug sales and everything. It was just not the greatest place to grow up, you know?
“Not a lot of them make it out of there. Not at all. A lot of kids that Davante played sports with ended up in jail or dead or just got caught up in the gang violence.”
“I literally could’ve lost my life,” Adams says, “just knowing, seeing people that I spent a lot of time with, how they lost their life, lost their freedom.”
Adams split time with his parents from the age of 5. Every Monday and Wednesday and every other weekend, he lived at his grandmother’s house in East Palo Alto with nine other people: his dad, his dad’s girlfriend, aunts, cousins and his grandmother. He never had his own bedroom, sleeping on a couch until he left for college.
“I’m a teenage boy growing into a man, my room is out in the open,” Adams says. “It’s the same place people come in and … sit down to hang out with my grandparents or my dad.”
Every Tuesday and Thursday and every other weekend, Adams lived 10 minutes away with his mom in a two-bedroom apartment in an affordable housing complex. Brown balanced two jobs, one as a site manager for software company Synopsys and one braiding hair out of her home after she returned from work.
“That was my superwoman,” Adams says. “My mom was the epitome of a legalized hustler.”
Adams never got — or wanted — an allowance because he felt he didn’t deserve to get paid for basic chores. He got $20 per week for lunch, but meals at a plaza across the street from Palo Alto High School cost $6. “And that &%$@ adds up,” Adams says.
Brown didn’t have time for a relationship amid her son’s basketball and football schedules, and she didn’t allow him to get a job because she wanted him either in school, at practice or a game or inside her house.
“I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You just do good in school so you can get a scholarship that I cannot afford, and I’ll get my grind on and work and I’ll support you in your sports,'” Brown says. “I kept him so tied up in sports that I didn’t allow him to know the streets.”
When Keith Williams arrived at Palo Alto High School in 2010, he didn’t know Davante Adams existed.
Williams, the Fresno State wide receivers coach at the time, was there to watch another player, but Palo Alto head coach Earl Hansen pulled Williams aside and advised he take a look at a senior receiver who had more recruiting buzz as a basketball player.
“I’m always open to finding a sleeper,” says Williams, now the Baltimore Ravens’ passing game coordinator, “So I don’t like leaving any stones unturned.”
The kid Hansen suggested carried a bigger, more physical frame and impressed Williams with how he adjusted to balls in the air, how he stayed on his feet after catching passes and how he carried himself. But Adams didn’t have eye-popping stats because of his team’s run-first nature, and his grades drove away at least one school.
“Cal came to talk to him when he was in high school, and that was like his dream college to go to,” Adams’ mom says. “And then when they start talking GPA, they took a look at his transcript and they saw a couple D’s or whatever on there, and they frown upon D’s.”
Adams had prioritized basketball over school. He had broken his arm three times before high school and didn’t start playing football until his junior year in 2009. He needed to catch up, on the field and off it.
Hansen knew Adams could do a 360-degree, between-the-legs dunk but wasn’t sure if he could play football. Adams didn’t understand route concepts. He knew what he was supposed to do, but not how he fit into the rest of the offense.
“He was as raw as can be,” Hansen, now retired, says.
Adams wasn’t even the Vikings’ best two-sport athlete at receiver. Joc Pederson, now an Atlanta Braves outfielder, caught 30 passes for 650 yards and nine touchdowns as a senior in 2009. (Adams caught 25 passes for 484 yards and seven touchdowns.) To this day, the back-to-back World Series champion maintains he was better.
“I mean, the numbers don’t lie,” Pederson says with a laugh.
Fresno State’s Williams liked what he saw enough to give Adams a chance when he found him the next year, even if he needed substantial work to become eligible. Adams took eight classes his senior year when everyone else took four. There were only seven school periods, so his day was longer than everyone else’s. Brown signed Adams up for four-hour SAT sessions on Saturdays (“He stayed pissed off at me,” she says). He took the SAT twice and the ACT once. He finished high school with a GPA in the low 3s.
He had played Superman, and all he needed to do to play at Fresno State was pass an oceanography class at San Jose City College to fulfill an outstanding NCAA credit requirement. “Literally the dumbest class I’ve ever taken in my life,” he says, still visibly frustrated about it.
Fresno State began training camp before the NCAA clearinghouse declared Adams eligible. While he waited for them to finalize his oceanography grade, he stood on the sideline in street clothes because he wasn’t allowed a uniform. Adams tore up camp when he was finally cleared, Williams said, but coaches chose to redshirt him because the Bulldogs had a stacked wideouts room.
That decision drew the angst of Adams and Fresno State’s starting quarterback, as the freshman receiver embarrassed starters in practice all season.
“I was like, ‘Why are we redshirting him? He’s not gonna be here all four years,'” says current Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Derek Carr, one of Adams’ best friends. “I remember saying that, like, to the head coach. And I’ll never forget it. They were just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you know what? You’re right.'”
Adams’ 2015 season with the Packers wasn’t hard on just him. It was hell for his mom, too. She read everything on Twitter. She couldn’t help it.
He’s the worst receiver in the NFL. They should cut him. He’s the king of drops.
“It was horrible,” Brown says. “I cried so much.”
Brown would call Davante to tell him what everyone was saying. He told her to stop checking Twitter. She didn’t listen. One time, she snapped.
“Davante is my baby,” she says. “He’s my only child, so I went into protector mode. I read one too many things, and this one time I went on Twitter and I replied and I went off on the dude … just to get my frustrations out.”
The tweet has long since been deleted. Brown doesn’t remember exactly what she said — something about not criticizing someone you don’t know, probably with some choice words sprinkled in. One of Adams’ friends sent him a screenshot of the tweet and he called her immediately. He told her not to give in, exactly what he was training himself to do as a stranger to such criticism.
Even as Adams floundered on the field, largely due to his insistence on playing through the ankle injury, a Packers teammate who had known Adams since he was in high school maintained faith he could one day prove fans who wanted #JanisOverAdams wrong.
“No. 1, I knew how good he was,” says former receiver James Jones, a San Jose State product who met Adams through Williams. “No. 2, you had to be a blind man to see he wasn’t 100 percent, and he still was out there trying to gut it out. … Everybody in that building knew that (Janis) wasn’t even close to Davante. And I love Jeffy with all my heart, but we all knew that.”
Jones also knew how much of that East Palo Alto grit Adams had in him, and Jones wanted to pry it out. So he claimed he was faster than Adams.
That did the trick.
“This is in the middle of the season,” Jones explains. “Davante is on a bum ankle and after practice, me and him lined it up and we raced in a 40. … We had one of the coaches dropping his hand for the go call, like it was a full-on race for the 40. And he beat me by the hairs of his chinny-chin-chin, and he’ll never let me hear it down. And he still ain’t faster than me.
“You don’t see that all the time,” Jones says. “Guys talk and do all this all the time on the football field, but they don’t ever lace ’em up.”
Adams had another believer in his corner, too.
“To have him play most of the season with an injury to his ankle — a guy who makes his living at the line of scrimmage — but to see him not complain the whole year really stuck with me,” Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers says. “How mentally tough he was from the previous year (through a lack of targets) and then physically tough through ’15. So you pair a mentally tough and a physically tough person together in the same person, you’re going to get something special, especially when you have the kind of crazy talent that he does.”
Adams had impressed teammates with his perseverance throughout a miserable second season in the NFL. He wanted to showcase that crazy talent, wanted to have fun playing football again — but first he needed to get healthy.
In 2016, he did. And in the three years following his disastrous 2015 campaign, Adams caught 35 touchdowns, second in the NFL to only Antonio Brown’s 36.
After the 49ers eviscerated the Packers in the 2019 NFC Championship Game, Adams called Williams, the coach who found him in high school.
They talked for an hour and a half. Adams had just lost his third NFC Championship Game, and it ate at him. He caught nine passes for 138 yards, but the game wasn’t even close. Adams felt like he wasn’t doing enough.
“He basically said, ‘I’m willing to do, think like, act like and behave any way I need to to become the best wideout in the NFL,'” Williams says.
Throughout the 2020 season, they spoke three to four times per week about every aspect of wideout play, from how to release off the line of scrimmage, how to think if you want to be a game-changer, even about maintaining balance down the sideline after Adams stepped out of bounds on what would’ve been a touchdown against the 49ers in Week 9.
Now his prowess after the catch, near-flawless hands, impeccable route-running and lethal releases comprise a total package that looks nothing like the defeated wide receiver who lost his cool on that car ride six years ago.
“I feel like I’m a game-changer,” Adams says. “There’s people out there that are good and premier wideouts, but not everybody’s a game-changer.”
If you don’t believe him, ask his peers.
Packers wide receiver Allen Lazard: “He’s an alien.”
Carr: “When he gets out wide or he lines up in the slot, the defender needs to know (he’s) guarding a true savage.”
Bengals cornerback Chidobe Awuzie: “He’s an animal.”
Packers head coach Matt LaFleur: “There’s a reason he’s got that ’99’ rating in Madden. He is a baller. I don’t think there’s anybody better than him.”
Packers defensive coordinator Joe Barry: “Davante is, in my opinion, hands down, the best in the league.”
Rodgers: “There (are) no 50-50 balls with Davante. It’s always in his favor.”
Jones: “Only way you can stop him is if he don’t get the ball thrown his way.”
Is Adams the best receiver in the game? At this point, he’s irritated by the debate.
“I’m truly done with even answering that question,” he says. “Because now I feel like it’s so obvious, to a certain extent at least, that I believe it. When people ask that, it’s like, ‘Ugh, God, like, you shouldn’t even be asking.’
“Of course I’ve been thinking this &%$@ since I had 24 touchdowns at Fresno. I was thinking that there’s nobody that could $%@# with me the whole time.”
Now there’s evidence to back that up.
Since the start of the 2016 season, Adams has 63 touchdown catches (eight more than anyone else), 6,618 receiving yards (fourth-most among wideouts) and 530 catches (second-most). Despite missing two and a half games last season, Adams led the NFL in touchdown catches (18) and receiving yards per game (98.1). This season, hounded with double coverage, Adams ranks third in the NFL with 97.9 receiving yards per game. Since his 10 drops in 2015, he has had only 12 over the last five-plus seasons.
In a matter of months, maybe sooner, Adams will become the highest-paid wide receiver in league history, possibly making as much as $30 million per year. A gold jacket might be in his future.
“It’s still surreal to me,” Brown says. “Because we don’t come from this. We come from a small little city. We don’t come from a lot of money. We don’t come from none of this.”
Earlier this season, she saw a TV commercial starring her son. She started crying, so she called him. Brown told Adams how proud she was of him. Adams told Brown how proud he was of her.
“I’m not doing anything,” she responded. “I’m just living.”
“Yes,” Adams chimed back. “And I was just living when you took care of me.”
Adams wears his past proudly — the things he saw that he shouldn’t have, the struggles he endured but overcame. He splits his time between two homes in Wisconsin and California with his wife and daughter, a stark difference from how he grew up and a testament to how far he has come.
“Now, for me, it’s just continuing to find ways to push myself so I can blow the roof off of this thing,” Adams says. “Because it’s Year 8, but it don’t feel like it. Got a lot more left in the tank.
“Just got to keep pushing and make sure I don’t go back to sleeping on no couches.”
“I hate football!”
It was November 2015, and he was at the wheel, driving home from Lambeau Field with his mom. Pamela Brown was startled by his outburst.
“Don’t say that!” Brown said. “No you don’t!”
She had flown from California to Green Bay to watch her son play the Bears. Adams’ wife, Devanne, was there, and so was her mom. Aaron Rodgers targeted Adams a team-high 11 times on that rainy night, but he caught only two passes for 14 yards. The Bears won 17-13.
“Yes I do!”
When they arrived back at Adams’ house, he retreated to his room and didn’t come out. Brown brought him a plate of food and left him alone. She was shocked, if only because her son hadn’t yet opened up to her about how his second season in the NFL, a personal disaster, was weighing on him.
It was the injuries. The drops. The lack of production. He was thrust into the No. 1 role following Jordy Nelson’s preseason ACL tear, but he sprained his ankle in Week 2. Adams re-aggravated the injury the following week, missed three games, then played through pain after he returned. This Thanksgiving night game, which Adams still calls the worst game of his career, was the tipping point.
He admits now that he paid too much attention to what people wrote about him online. He remembers fans wanting him gone, the Twitter hashtags calling for 2014 seventh-rounder Jeff Janis to take his place. After a regular season in which he caught just 50 passes for 483 yards with a career-low one touchdown catch and a career-high 10 drops, he finished the year by tearing his MCL in a divisional-round win against Washington.
“It was definitely a sad time in my career,” Adams tells The Athletic.
Two years prior, Adams amassed 24 touchdown catches at Fresno State — eight more than anyone else in college football. He was second in the nation with 1,719 receiving yards. That was enough to be selected in the second round of the 2014 draft after his redshirt sophomore season.
“I was so used to doing what I was doing in college,” he says. “Go and score literally two touchdowns a game, putting up monster numbers, just having a great time.”
This failure was foreign, but Adams had navigated worse.
When he’s introduced as Davante Adams from Palo Alto, he interjects.
It’s East Palo Alto. Not the east part of Palo Alto, which is what people think he means, but a city entirely its own in California’s Bay Area.
When thinking about the two cities, “The Lion King” provides a helpful comparison, Adams says. Palo Alto — synonymous with Silicon Valley and extreme wealth and home to Stanford University and Tesla — is like Pride Rock.
East Palo Alto is like the Elephant Graveyard. That is where he’s from.
“It’s not too far away,” Adams says. “But it’s two totally different worlds.”
After a long pause and a deep breath, he continues: “It’s tough talking about it.” One of his best friends was killed. He witnessed drive-by shootings. Brown wouldn’t let him leave the house unless he had a specific destination, not even if he just wanted to play outside.
“Knowing where we were from, I just refused for my kid to be another statistic,” Brown says. “East Palo Alto was always like the underdog city. It was a lot of gang violence. It was a lot of drug sales and everything. It was just not the greatest place to grow up, you know?
“Not a lot of them make it out of there. Not at all. A lot of kids that Davante played sports with ended up in jail or dead or just got caught up in the gang violence.”
“I literally could’ve lost my life,” Adams says, “just knowing, seeing people that I spent a lot of time with, how they lost their life, lost their freedom.”
Adams split time with his parents from the age of 5. Every Monday and Wednesday and every other weekend, he lived at his grandmother’s house in East Palo Alto with nine other people: his dad, his dad’s girlfriend, aunts, cousins and his grandmother. He never had his own bedroom, sleeping on a couch until he left for college.
“I’m a teenage boy growing into a man, my room is out in the open,” Adams says. “It’s the same place people come in and … sit down to hang out with my grandparents or my dad.”
Every Tuesday and Thursday and every other weekend, Adams lived 10 minutes away with his mom in a two-bedroom apartment in an affordable housing complex. Brown balanced two jobs, one as a site manager for software company Synopsys and one braiding hair out of her home after she returned from work.
“That was my superwoman,” Adams says. “My mom was the epitome of a legalized hustler.”
Adams never got — or wanted — an allowance because he felt he didn’t deserve to get paid for basic chores. He got $20 per week for lunch, but meals at a plaza across the street from Palo Alto High School cost $6. “And that &%$@ adds up,” Adams says.
Brown didn’t have time for a relationship amid her son’s basketball and football schedules, and she didn’t allow him to get a job because she wanted him either in school, at practice or a game or inside her house.
“I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You just do good in school so you can get a scholarship that I cannot afford, and I’ll get my grind on and work and I’ll support you in your sports,'” Brown says. “I kept him so tied up in sports that I didn’t allow him to know the streets.”
When Keith Williams arrived at Palo Alto High School in 2010, he didn’t know Davante Adams existed.
Williams, the Fresno State wide receivers coach at the time, was there to watch another player, but Palo Alto head coach Earl Hansen pulled Williams aside and advised he take a look at a senior receiver who had more recruiting buzz as a basketball player.
“I’m always open to finding a sleeper,” says Williams, now the Baltimore Ravens’ passing game coordinator, “So I don’t like leaving any stones unturned.”
The kid Hansen suggested carried a bigger, more physical frame and impressed Williams with how he adjusted to balls in the air, how he stayed on his feet after catching passes and how he carried himself. But Adams didn’t have eye-popping stats because of his team’s run-first nature, and his grades drove away at least one school.
“Cal came to talk to him when he was in high school, and that was like his dream college to go to,” Adams’ mom says. “And then when they start talking GPA, they took a look at his transcript and they saw a couple D’s or whatever on there, and they frown upon D’s.”
Adams had prioritized basketball over school. He had broken his arm three times before high school and didn’t start playing football until his junior year in 2009. He needed to catch up, on the field and off it.
Hansen knew Adams could do a 360-degree, between-the-legs dunk but wasn’t sure if he could play football. Adams didn’t understand route concepts. He knew what he was supposed to do, but not how he fit into the rest of the offense.
“He was as raw as can be,” Hansen, now retired, says.
Adams wasn’t even the Vikings’ best two-sport athlete at receiver. Joc Pederson, now an Atlanta Braves outfielder, caught 30 passes for 650 yards and nine touchdowns as a senior in 2009. (Adams caught 25 passes for 484 yards and seven touchdowns.) To this day, the back-to-back World Series champion maintains he was better.
“I mean, the numbers don’t lie,” Pederson says with a laugh.
Fresno State’s Williams liked what he saw enough to give Adams a chance when he found him the next year, even if he needed substantial work to become eligible. Adams took eight classes his senior year when everyone else took four. There were only seven school periods, so his day was longer than everyone else’s. Brown signed Adams up for four-hour SAT sessions on Saturdays (“He stayed pissed off at me,” she says). He took the SAT twice and the ACT once. He finished high school with a GPA in the low 3s.
He had played Superman, and all he needed to do to play at Fresno State was pass an oceanography class at San Jose City College to fulfill an outstanding NCAA credit requirement. “Literally the dumbest class I’ve ever taken in my life,” he says, still visibly frustrated about it.
Fresno State began training camp before the NCAA clearinghouse declared Adams eligible. While he waited for them to finalize his oceanography grade, he stood on the sideline in street clothes because he wasn’t allowed a uniform. Adams tore up camp when he was finally cleared, Williams said, but coaches chose to redshirt him because the Bulldogs had a stacked wideouts room.
That decision drew the angst of Adams and Fresno State’s starting quarterback, as the freshman receiver embarrassed starters in practice all season.
“I was like, ‘Why are we redshirting him? He’s not gonna be here all four years,'” says current Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Derek Carr, one of Adams’ best friends. “I remember saying that, like, to the head coach. And I’ll never forget it. They were just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you know what? You’re right.'”
Adams’ 2015 season with the Packers wasn’t hard on just him. It was hell for his mom, too. She read everything on Twitter. She couldn’t help it.
He’s the worst receiver in the NFL. They should cut him. He’s the king of drops.
“It was horrible,” Brown says. “I cried so much.”
Brown would call Davante to tell him what everyone was saying. He told her to stop checking Twitter. She didn’t listen. One time, she snapped.
“Davante is my baby,” she says. “He’s my only child, so I went into protector mode. I read one too many things, and this one time I went on Twitter and I replied and I went off on the dude … just to get my frustrations out.”
The tweet has long since been deleted. Brown doesn’t remember exactly what she said — something about not criticizing someone you don’t know, probably with some choice words sprinkled in. One of Adams’ friends sent him a screenshot of the tweet and he called her immediately. He told her not to give in, exactly what he was training himself to do as a stranger to such criticism.
Even as Adams floundered on the field, largely due to his insistence on playing through the ankle injury, a Packers teammate who had known Adams since he was in high school maintained faith he could one day prove fans who wanted #JanisOverAdams wrong.
“No. 1, I knew how good he was,” says former receiver James Jones, a San Jose State product who met Adams through Williams. “No. 2, you had to be a blind man to see he wasn’t 100 percent, and he still was out there trying to gut it out. … Everybody in that building knew that (Janis) wasn’t even close to Davante. And I love Jeffy with all my heart, but we all knew that.”
Jones also knew how much of that East Palo Alto grit Adams had in him, and Jones wanted to pry it out. So he claimed he was faster than Adams.
That did the trick.
“This is in the middle of the season,” Jones explains. “Davante is on a bum ankle and after practice, me and him lined it up and we raced in a 40. … We had one of the coaches dropping his hand for the go call, like it was a full-on race for the 40. And he beat me by the hairs of his chinny-chin-chin, and he’ll never let me hear it down. And he still ain’t faster than me.
“You don’t see that all the time,” Jones says. “Guys talk and do all this all the time on the football field, but they don’t ever lace ’em up.”
Adams had another believer in his corner, too.
“To have him play most of the season with an injury to his ankle — a guy who makes his living at the line of scrimmage — but to see him not complain the whole year really stuck with me,” Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers says. “How mentally tough he was from the previous year (through a lack of targets) and then physically tough through ’15. So you pair a mentally tough and a physically tough person together in the same person, you’re going to get something special, especially when you have the kind of crazy talent that he does.”
Adams had impressed teammates with his perseverance throughout a miserable second season in the NFL. He wanted to showcase that crazy talent, wanted to have fun playing football again — but first he needed to get healthy.
In 2016, he did. And in the three years following his disastrous 2015 campaign, Adams caught 35 touchdowns, second in the NFL to only Antonio Brown’s 36.
After the 49ers eviscerated the Packers in the 2019 NFC Championship Game, Adams called Williams, the coach who found him in high school.
They talked for an hour and a half. Adams had just lost his third NFC Championship Game, and it ate at him. He caught nine passes for 138 yards, but the game wasn’t even close. Adams felt like he wasn’t doing enough.
“He basically said, ‘I’m willing to do, think like, act like and behave any way I need to to become the best wideout in the NFL,'” Williams says.
Throughout the 2020 season, they spoke three to four times per week about every aspect of wideout play, from how to release off the line of scrimmage, how to think if you want to be a game-changer, even about maintaining balance down the sideline after Adams stepped out of bounds on what would’ve been a touchdown against the 49ers in Week 9.
Now his prowess after the catch, near-flawless hands, impeccable route-running and lethal releases comprise a total package that looks nothing like the defeated wide receiver who lost his cool on that car ride six years ago.
“I feel like I’m a game-changer,” Adams says. “There’s people out there that are good and premier wideouts, but not everybody’s a game-changer.”
If you don’t believe him, ask his peers.
Packers wide receiver Allen Lazard: “He’s an alien.”
Carr: “When he gets out wide or he lines up in the slot, the defender needs to know (he’s) guarding a true savage.”
Bengals cornerback Chidobe Awuzie: “He’s an animal.”
Packers head coach Matt LaFleur: “There’s a reason he’s got that ’99’ rating in Madden. He is a baller. I don’t think there’s anybody better than him.”
Packers defensive coordinator Joe Barry: “Davante is, in my opinion, hands down, the best in the league.”
Rodgers: “There (are) no 50-50 balls with Davante. It’s always in his favor.”
Jones: “Only way you can stop him is if he don’t get the ball thrown his way.”
Is Adams the best receiver in the game? At this point, he’s irritated by the debate.
“I’m truly done with even answering that question,” he says. “Because now I feel like it’s so obvious, to a certain extent at least, that I believe it. When people ask that, it’s like, ‘Ugh, God, like, you shouldn’t even be asking.’
“Of course I’ve been thinking this &%$@ since I had 24 touchdowns at Fresno. I was thinking that there’s nobody that could $%@# with me the whole time.”
Now there’s evidence to back that up.
Since the start of the 2016 season, Adams has 63 touchdown catches (eight more than anyone else), 6,618 receiving yards (fourth-most among wideouts) and 530 catches (second-most). Despite missing two and a half games last season, Adams led the NFL in touchdown catches (18) and receiving yards per game (98.1). This season, hounded with double coverage, Adams ranks third in the NFL with 97.9 receiving yards per game. Since his 10 drops in 2015, he has had only 12 over the last five-plus seasons.
In a matter of months, maybe sooner, Adams will become the highest-paid wide receiver in league history, possibly making as much as $30 million per year. A gold jacket might be in his future.
“It’s still surreal to me,” Brown says. “Because we don’t come from this. We come from a small little city. We don’t come from a lot of money. We don’t come from none of this.”
Earlier this season, she saw a TV commercial starring her son. She started crying, so she called him. Brown told Adams how proud she was of him. Adams told Brown how proud he was of her.
“I’m not doing anything,” she responded. “I’m just living.”
“Yes,” Adams chimed back. “And I was just living when you took care of me.”
Adams wears his past proudly — the things he saw that he shouldn’t have, the struggles he endured but overcame. He splits his time between two homes in Wisconsin and California with his wife and daughter, a stark difference from how he grew up and a testament to how far he has come.
“Now, for me, it’s just continuing to find ways to push myself so I can blow the roof off of this thing,” Adams says. “Because it’s Year 8, but it don’t feel like it. Got a lot more left in the tank.
“Just got to keep pushing and make sure I don’t go back to sleeping on no couches.”
