How WR Davante Adams and Puka Nacua can flourish in the same offense

Jordan Whittington positioned for a big year

The Los Angeles Rams stared down the barrel of the 2024 NFL Draft, a year loaded with wide receiver talent, and grudgingly selected one rookie wide receiver. The lone addition to the receiver room from last year's draft is former Texas wide receiver Jordan Whittington. Whittington's draft profile was not promising, describing a young receiver whose best attributes were a willingness to block and be a decoy to free up other receivers. Now, here is what draft analysts got wrong, and why the Rams made Whittington their lone selection.

Professional football is more than Fantasy Football statistics. At a time when athletes' compensation is proportional to name recognition, WR Jordan Whittington is a throwback to the 'Team First' mindset.

Like trying to teach college basketball players how to play defense, trying to teach rookie receivers how to block, how to clear out zones, and how to run with the football are the most difficult coaching components for significant playing time. And yet, Whittington arrived on the Rams roster with an excellent portfolio in all those categories.

All that remained was to coach Whittington on how to run his routes and when to hit his marks to meet the football. The fact that he hauled in 22 of 28 passes (a 78.6 percent catch rate) for 293 yards proves that he has plenty more where that came from.

Standing 6-foot-1 and weighing 202 pounds, the absence of Cooper Kupp (6-foot-2, 207 pounds) may be all that is required to springboard Whittington into a far more meaningful role this season. After all, the Rams offense must replace the production of Kupp (100 targets), Demarcus Robinson (64 targets), and Tyler Johnson (41 targets).

Even if Whittington is targeted 50 or more times in 2025, he will likely put up over 500 receiving yards. Even that amount feels conservative.

In just three starts in all of the 2024 NFL season, rookie WR Jordan Whittington hauled in 16 of 22 passes for 237 receiving yards. Over 17 games, that projects to 1,343 receiving yards. While not at Puka Nacua's sensational rookie season, it's close enough (in theory) to be very optimistic over Whittington's upcoming season.

Will the Rams add a wide receiver? I would not be surprised if they did. But with the current receiving corps, this is a diverse and complementary bunch of receivers who threaten opposing secondaries in more ways than ever before. The ongoing challenge to any rookie receiver addition (who is not named Puka Nacua) is the difficulty in breaking into the rotation and getting targets in their first NFL season.

Ultimately, both WR Davante Adams and Puka Nacua can flourish in the same offense. The trick will be ensuring that there are plenty of offensive plays and targets to go around. While the Rams may want to be a more explosive offense, the play-calling will need to walk a fine line between huge gains and time-consuming offensive drives. I'm eager to see how the Rams pull it off.

As always, thanks for reading.

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