Turf Show Times
Davante Adams posted the lowest completion percentage of his 12-year NFL career in 2025, at 52.6%. What caused that?
Some of the problem was he and Matthew Stafford not completely gelling, but, most notable to me, it was simply Adams not completing the catch. At 33 years old, was Father Time tapping him on the shoulder? According to a study by Dwain McFarland, it could be the case.
“To appropriately understand the magnitude of age in the WR performance equation, I decided to divide production at each age (20 to 40) by their prime production. Prime production equals the average fantasy points per game for a player’s best three-year stretch in their career, and player ages were rounded based on their age on Week 1 for each season.
After compiling that data across every season where a WR had at least 200 routes from 2011 to 2023, we get a clear picture of when WRs are at their peak and when they begin to decline. For the sake of simplicity, buckets were created for age groups based on performance.“
However, looking at the drop off in catch percentage, I wondered if that particular statistic could be explained by something else. Age doesn’t necessarily hamper a player’s ability to catch the ball, does it?
I found a clip of every single pass thrown to Adams and watched it a couple of times. Davante Adams ran a highly diversified route tree with the Los Angeles Rams in 2025, excelling in vertical routes, deep comebacks, and red-zone slants, but he looked very uncomfortable on crossing patterns when the ball was thrown while he was running between the hash marks. He was fine, however, running a curl, finding a spot, and sitting there. I think I found out why.
During the second play in this clip of Adams in the Houston game, Stafford hits Adams on a crossing pattern at the left hashmark. When he’s down on his knees, Henry To’o To’o drops his shoulder and hits Adams in the head with a brutal shot. If it were a college game, I suspect To’o To’o would have been tossed for targeting. His trepidation in the middle of the field after this hit is understandable.
Understanding the physics of a head-on collision like this takes years of study, but to put it simply in sports involving contact, the force in a head-on collision is roughly equal to the sum of the speeds of the two players. If Adams was traveling at 19 mph and To’o To’o at 17 mph, the force Adams would have felt would be like running into a brick wall at 36 mph. Being tackled from behind or from the side creates a fraction of that force.
Over the course of the season, as I watched, it was the same on virtually every pass. Curl routes, over the shoulder, end zone fades, and anything along the sidelines, he looked confident. Across the middle, with the...
