Add The California Post on Google Davante Adams has spent most of his career proving he could keep going.
Now, at 33 years old and entering his 13th NFL season, the Los Angeles Rams are asking him to prove something considerably more difficult: that it’s okay to stop.
Adams is part of several Rams veterans that have scheduled rest days during the team’s training camp at Loyola Marymount University. Scheduled rest is one of those modern football concepts guaranteed to irritate anyone that played the game before 1987.
The old-school crowd that still remembers when they wore leather helmets. The ones that think training camp is supposed to be a boiling furnace where players are thrown inside, the weak melt and the strong emerge carrying the scars to prove they belong.
“Training camp is not supposed to come out here and tear your body down to separate the boys from the men,” Adams said Sunday after practice. “That’s the old school way of doing things. There are ways of separating the boys from the men, but I don’t think it’s through just trying to callous us coming out here and killing us on the field.”
Adams has lived that life and he still believes in it to a certain extent.
“It took me 12 years to even have an off-day,” Adams said on Sunday. “I’m not built that way. I’m not going to tell you I’m not going to practice. You have to tell me I’m not going to practice.”
That’s the contradiction at the core of every aging superstar. Adams’ stubbornness and refusal to not practice has gotten him to six Pro-Bowls, three All-Pro selections, over 12,000 receiving yards and 117 touchdowns, the most among all active players in the NFL.
But that stubbornness is now the very thing that Rams’ head coach Sean McVay is occasionally trying to save him from.
“We’ve got to pull them back and protect them from [themselves] because they just want to work,” said McVay.
Adams’ talent and ability is not in question. The warranty on it, however, is getting shorter.
“If you don’t tell me not to practice, you’re going to see me out there all day and it’s going to be a lot more stress on those legs,” Adams said. “Sometimes rest and recovery is even as big as the strain.”
Adams jokes that NFL seasons are similar to dog years, in that one season is equivalent to seven human years.
“What’s 13 times seven?” he asked. “Because this is dog years out here.”
That makes Adams 91 years old in football time, an age where every hamstring has its own attorney and getting out of bed can qualify as the first competitive drill of the morning.
Even at 91 years old, Adams still runs pristine routes against the Rams’ new All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie. When you watch the two superstars attack each other, Adams does not look like a man approaching retirement. He still looks every bit like the receiver that has led the league in touchdown receptions in three different seasons, including last year.
The veteran receiver relishes his daily duels with McDuffie and praises the cornerback’s technique, intelligence and ability to always be near the football. Adams described their battles by using a phrase that has been shared by several players during the first week of training camp.
If all the starters manage to stay healthy, the Rams offense and defense will be sharper than an obsidian blade by the end of the season. But iron does not sharpen iron by grinding both pieces together until they disintegrate.
That’s where football’s past meets its present and logic wins over stupidity. Making a 33-year-old receiver or 38-year-old quarterback absorb unnecessary hits and mileage on their legs in July and August does not establish a culture.
“They’re still counting how old I am,” joked Stafford of his NFL-age in dog years. “It takes a lot out of you. It’s not even the physical part of it for me. A lot of times it’s just the mental and emotional part of it…week in and week out, year in and year out, it takes a lot out of you.”
Teams across the league now schedule veteran days and manage training-camp repetitions, not because competition has become soft, but because franchises finally learned that players are more valuable on Sundays than they are winning some assistant coach’s exhaustion contest on a random Wednesday in July.
The Rams are applying the same caution to a bevy of players, including the reigning NFL Defensive Player of the Year winner Myles Garrett, who is dealing with lower-body soreness and has missed the last three days of practice.
McVay has stressed that there’s absolutely no cause for concern, just another example of how the Rams are trying to keep Garrett and the rest of their superstars fresh for a season that begins nearly 8,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia.
McVay, who enters his 10th season as head coach of the Rams, has learned that his greatest strength may no longer be the plays he designs, but the patience and restraint he has developed.
“I’m getting more patient as I’m getting older,” admitted McVay.
That patience means knowing when to push, when to pull back, and when an athlete’s pride is lying to him. Adams is just one example.
Adams and Garrett are still chasing the championship that has eluded them. Adams said after the loss to the Seahawks in the NFC Championship Game, that Stafford found him on the plane ride home and apologized because he wanted Adams to win a Super Bowl so badly.
To get there this season, the Rams need their best players peaking in January, not August.
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