New star receivers shows he’s unselfish
Last week when he was introduced to the media after his trade to the Las Vegas Raiders, All Pro wide receiver Davante Adams made an interesting comment.
Adams, who the Raiders sent first and second-round draft picks to the Green Bay Packers for, said he realized the Raiders have other weapons such as star tight end Darren Waller and slot receiver Hunter Renfrow. So, he said he already told Raiders’ quarterback Derek Carr — Adam’s close friend and college teammate at Fresno State — not to feel obligated to get him the ball.
“I’m a secure wide receiver so at the end of the day, I know what I bring,” Adams said a week ago. “I told Derek, ‘Don’t feel any pressure to force me the ball or nothing. We don’t have to try to please the media, please anybody. Let’s just go out there and do this thing like we did before.’ We put together a pretty good resume in college together. This ain’t college, but we still got that connection so looking forward to putting it on display.”
Adams had a career-high 123 receptions and 1,553 receiving yards in 2021. On Monday. Las Vegas coach Josh McDaniels expressed that he was impressed by Adams’ attitude and how he will fit into the offense.
“I think that says a lot about him. He’s unselfish, and at the end of the day, I think you’re talking about two really mature guys (Adams and Carr),” McDaniels said at the NFL owners’ meetings. “Look, if you want to win and you want to win playoff games and you want to compete to do the things that we want to do in our organization, and those players want to do themselves as teammates, those are the things you have to do. There’s really no choice about this. I mean you can’t just be hardheaded and start throwing it to one person and all that stuff. That’ll never work. I don’t care who the two people are. I’ve been fortunate to coach some different combinations of those kind of players. The right thing to do is always what’s best for the team. And I think those two guys understand that and the fact that they have a great attitude about it, I think is really helpful for everybody else.”
McDaniels downplayed Adams’ and Carr’s history together as the reason for the trade, though.
“It’s hard for me to say because when we were made aware that they would possibly move him, at that point it really wasn’t about a relationship that they had. I knew of it; I was aware of it and certainly am aware of it, but I don’t think that really had much to do with our interest. We were looking at it from, alright, from a football perspective, does this make sense? Certainly, their relationship for them, it clearly made a lot of sense for them to want to do that,” McDaniels said.
“But I’m sure there’s probably a lot of players that have played with other guys that want to have a chance to play together and maybe they don’t ever get the chance to do so. So, we were looking at it from a football perspective, from the Raiders perspective, does this make us a better football team? What do we have to give up? Is it equivalent to the player we think we’re getting back in return? Those are hard decisions. And so, we were looking at more from that perspective. Really on a personal note, happy for those two guys. There’s not a lot of guys who get to do that. I’m excited for those two guys personally because I know that they have an affection for one another as people and families and those kinds of things. It runs a lot deeper than football, so it’ll be fun to watch those two guys together.”
Meanwhile, our friends at BreakingT has two new Adams’ Raiders shirts. Check them out here.