In July of last year, Davante Adams said on the Netflix documentary Receiver that he signed off on the Raiders benching Jimmy Garoppolo in 2023.
A year later, Adams and Garoppolo are teammates again and depending on the health of Matthew Stafford, Adams and Garoppolo could soon be playing meaningful games together again.
If Garoppolo does end up throwing passes to Adams this year, it would be an interesting dynamic to watch unfold, and Adams was asked about the possibility this week.
According to Adams, he was never unhappy with Garoppolo in Las Vegas. It was apparently the situation he wasn’t happy about in Las Vegas.
“I love Jimmy. It was never a personal thing,” Adams told ESPN Los Angeles on Wednesday. “That was just a dark moment in all of our lives. I think all of us were pretty miserable over there.”
Not long after Adams left for the Jets in October of 2024, Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter talked about the star wide receiver’s propensity to blast his former teams, and Carpenter said Adams was alienating himself to some in the league with his weekly talking points on the Raiders.
“Players don’t really spend a lot of time worried about the fans, but they do care about what other players in the league think, and I can tell you every time Davante opens his mouth, he’s alienating people who are in this league that no longer respect him,” Carpenter said last year on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
“I got his comments sent to me from someone in the NFL. I’m not going to say who or what team, but I don’t think it would be too difficult to figure out what team it is,” Carpenter continued. “In my opinion… He was coddled in Vegas. He came in the alleged superstar, yada, yada, yada… got treated like gold, and even when he didn’t treat this organization like gold or his teammates like gold, he was treated great.”
Adams hasn’t passed on many opportunities to take shots at the Raiders, but earlier this year it was Garoppolo who seized an opportunity to make a statement on his former team.
“I kind of knew where I wanted to be,” Garoppolo told the Los Angeles Times in March about his decision to sign with the Rams. “The Rams came with a strong offer, I love the people here, love the teammates. So really, I’m at the point of my career, those are the little things that make a difference to me.”
“It’s really more about the situation than the opportunity. There were some opportunities. But I’ve been in a bad organization, and I’ve seen how it can wear on you throughout the year. Just talking to my brothers, my family, didn’t want to go through that again.”