Throughout his 11-year NFL career, Davante Adams has been one of the most reliable wide receivers in the league.
He catches almost everything thrown his way and his body has held up at a position that takes a tremendous amount of physical abuse.
Until two weeks ago, the last time Davante Adams missed a regular season game was October 28, 2021, and that was on account of the NFL’s COVID-19 protocols.
But for reasons we can only speculate about, Adams suddenly can’t seem to stay on the field.
There’s a popular underlying opinion among fans and NFL commenters that Adams “created” a hamstring injury because he didn’t want to play for the Raiders anymore, and at the very least, the timing of his injury is suspicious.
Just days after reporting an issue with his hamstring, Adams requested a trade from the Raiders and the All-Pro wide receiver hasn’t suited up for a practice or game since.
ESPN’s Adam Schefter called it a “real, legitimate hamstring injury” that Adams is dealing with, but there are too many coincidences to overlook for a player that had a conveniently similar injury ahead of a preseason game in August that he didn’t want to be a part of.
It’s been mostly forgotten now, but just under two months ago Adams and Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce were going back and forth in the media about whether the starters should play against the Dallas Cowboys in week 2 of the preseason.
Adams said he didn’t want to play, and Pierce said he wanted every healthy starter to play in the game.
The result was Adams experiencing some discomfort in practice and missing the game, which led to this exchange between beat writers covering the team in August…
Now fast-forward to the present…
Given what we know now about Adams and his recent trade request, he has every reason to stay away from the football field until the Raiders make the decision to trade him.
The only way that can happen without an incredible number of awkward interactions is to have some sort of injury sideline him until he finds a new team. The injury either needed to be real or something that cannot be proven to be fake.
As it turned out, Adams developed a “real” injury that can be difficult, at times, to medically assess.
On Wednesday, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported that on account of his hamstring injury, Adams is not expected to play on Sunday.
If you have been keeping score at home, the expectation this week was that Adams’ hamstring was finally going to be healthy enough to orchestrate a trade, but instead, the hamstring is so bad that insiders are confident he won’t be able to play football four days from now.
If it had only happened once this year, maybe there wouldn’t be as many skeptics, but it will take an incredible amount of evidence to convince Raider fans and free-thinking media types that Adams is being truthful about his hamstring.
For all the talk from Adams about being a straight shooter and only believing reports that come from him, he had every opportunity to confirm last week that he had requested a trade.
Instead, he pretended to have no idea why Pierce would ‘like’ a social media post about the Raiders looking to trade him.
As the old saying goes… fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
From the outside, it looks like the relationship between Pierce and Adams had been unsteady since the start of the season. Maybe there’s more to the story and those details will be disclosed by Adams in his next candid conversation on the Up and Adams Show.
Until then, these words from Rex Ryan don’t seem particularly unreasonable…
x: @raidersbeat
Adams is a deep threat wide receiver, one of the best, who is not keen on blocking. The very second that AP benched AOC and professed his love for the ground and pound ways of the 1930’s Adams was out. AOC was his guy, his QB. The Raiders do not have an offensive coordinator and proving that high school plays don’t work in the NFL and the defensive mentality to win by only 3 each week was established, Adams knew that this was not his type of football. I can’t blame him one bit.
AP turned on the QB that won him his job. AP is not ready to be a Head Coach and might never be.