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Sarah Barshop
Watch Puka Nacua on the sideline before each offensive possession, and you’ll see the Los Angeles receiver ask a teammate to hit his pads. Hard.
Players from tight end Tyler Higbee to left guard Steve Avila, tackle AJ Arcuri and former Rams center Brian Allen have participated in the ritual over Nacua’s three years in the league. Nacua said he has a “mixture of guys” who have done it, but he’s picky: “I want somebody who’s got a good slap in them,” Nacua said. “I don’t want them to baby me, for sure.”
“The first one is always like, ‘Oh, go out there. Good job, buddy'” Nacua said. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not at all what I want from you guys.’ The first one normally ends up being six slaps because the first three, they’re like, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ I’m like, ‘All right, come on. I didn’t ask you to give me a little pat on the back.'”
Nacua performs the ritual in part because of a feeling from when he was a little kid. Growing up with older brothers, he felt their intensity in the car on the way to big games, like his peewee football championships.
“Being in the car with them and the music, the tone, the intensity and definitely getting hit [by them while getting] out of the car as I was running out there for the football field, a part of that takes me back,” Nacua said. “I think it’s always nice to get a little wake up on the sideline before you officially get hit by somebody else.”
One of those hits came early in the third quarter against the Indianapolis Colts in Week 4, forcing Nacua to head to the locker room to get X-rays taken of his left thumb.
He had been rolled up on one of the run plays, he said, and had to make sure nothing was broken. After being given the all-clear, Nacua returned to the game and caught a 17-yard pass on his first drive back.
This isn’t the first time this season — and certainly not the first time in his career — that Nacua’s physical play has been on display. The third-year receiver is known for his toughness on the field, willing to get dirty while blocking in the run game and fighting for extra yards after the catch. Not only can he “get open and catch the football,” head coach Sean McVay said, but “what he does after the ball’s in his hands is really — it’s special stuff.”
“I think his play style rubs off on everybody on our team, not just the offense,” quarterback Matthew Stafford said. “I think our defense looks at him like, ‘S—, we’ll ride with that guy all day.’ I know that’s how we feel on offense.”
That “play style” has helped Nacua become one of the best young receivers in the league. After a 13-catch, 170-yard performance in Week 4, Nacua is now 21 receiving yards away from 3,000 in his career. With at least 21 receiving yards on Thursday night against the San Francisco 49ers (8:15 p.m. ET, Amazon), Nacua would tie Justin Jefferson for the second-fewest career games (33) needed to reach that mark, according to ESPN Research.
“His game comes to life on Sundays,” Stafford said. “He goes out there in practice and he’s working. …He’s making plays and all that, but when it becomes tackle football is when Puka Nacua’s game comes to life.”
STAFFORD WITNESSED Nacua’s aggressive nature well before they played together on Sunday. From the receiver’s very first offseason training program with the Rams, Stafford watched the rookie fifth-round pick in practice and could see how physically he played.
“Then you put the pads on [during training camp] and you go, ‘Whoa, this is a physical football player that happens to play receiver,'” Stafford said. “I think early on you could feel it and notice it, whether that was blocking for guys in the run game or after the catch at the top of a route. However it showed up, it was very evident.”
For Nacua, whose physical style of play was also present at BYU, his first training camp padded practice was an eye-opener.
“You feel the weight of a 280-pound guy at the line of scrimmage, you’re like, holy cow, the bench press that we’re doing definitely didn’t prepare me for that,” Nacua said. “The downhill demeanor and the explosiveness that they have when they’re coming downfield and then being like, all right, buckle your chest and your shoulder pads up a little tighter and make sure you got both of them ready to go, so you can hit somebody as square and as firm as you can.”
It’s because of the toll even practices can take on Nacua that the Rams have tried to protect him so he is healthy enough to be out there on Sundays.
On the practice field, Rams wide receivers coach Eric Yarber said he, pass game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase and offensive assistant Rob Calabrese do a drop-step drill “where you catch the ball and get vertical immediately.”
“And when you do that, it changes guys’ angles so they can’t get direct hits on you,” Yarber said. “We’ve got accurate quarterbacks, so if you’re running a stick route or a pivot route and they put it over your right shoulder, they’re telling you to turn right away from the traffic. If they put it over your left shoulder, it’s telling you to turn left. So they’re protecting you.”
The Rams also try to lighten up Nacua’s reps during practice because of how many he takes during a game. Nacua has played 76.72% of the Rams’ offensive snaps through four games — and that includes time he had to miss while getting stitches in the season opener — and had 42 catches on 50 targets. Nacua’s 42 catches and 503 receiving yards lead the league through four weeks.
“If we got an eight-play rack, hopefully he gets four plays out of that eight,” Yarber said. “And even though he wants to be out there full time, you’ve got to protect him from himself.”
But while the Rams want to protect Nacua the best they can, his quarterback understands that “there’s a fine line of getting every yard you can get, but also understanding that if there are opportunities to try and protect yourself or to go for it.
“It’s tough to turn that switch off, to be honest with you,” Stafford said. “You’re out there, our nervous systems are going crazy. We’re in fight or flight. It’s hit or be hit. That’s the way everybody that I know that’s successful at this game plays. You have to understand that’s part of it. I understand that the person sitting on their couch at home is probably like, ‘Man, why don’t you just get down and run out of bounds or do this?’ It’s like, well, the last three hours I’ve been doing it the other way and you have to go to that mental place to kind of get there.”
Does Nacua ever try to avoid a hit?
“I would say no,” Nacua said with a laugh. “No, it’s definitely not something that … those are some of those second thoughts, they just never make it to the front.”
1:09
Is Puka Nacua the best WR in the NFL?
Andrew Hawkins and Dan Orlovsky give Puka Nacua high praise going into Week 3, saying he’s “the best wide receiver in football.”
IT WAS EARLY in the first game of Nacua’s NFL career that McVay saw just how physical his rookie receiver could be.
Against the Seattle Seahawks to open the season in 2023, the Rams faced a second-and-17 late in the first quarter. Nacua ran “a little 5-yard stick route and he took it all the way to the goal line,” Yarber recalled.
“A linebacker hit him, a safety hit him, and he broke both tackles and got us down to the [1-]yard line where we scored after that,” Yarber said.
Added Nacua: “I spun out of it and [was] like, ‘Holy cow, I’m still on my feet.'”
A play “that probably should have gone 3 or 4 [yards],” Rams offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur said, went for 16 yards instead.
“After that play I said, ‘Man, this dude is something different,'” Yarber said. “That’s probably the first time that you saw his physical play. And then every game after that, [defensive backs] didn’t want to hit him. You could see that it was hard to tackle him, and he was getting more excited about blocking and run after catch.”
Nacua said that play made him realize his physical style of play could translate from college to the NFL: “Especially being able to run after the catch and after contact and be like ‘Oh, somebody hit me, I’m still up and I’m still running.'”
That catch was the second of Nacua’s NFL career and a sign of big things to come for his rookie season. The 2023 fifth-round pick finished with 105 catches for 1,486 yards, both NFL records for a first-year player.
IT DIDN’T TAKE long during Davante Adams’ first time playing in a game with Nacua for the veteran receiver to see up close what he had heard about the way Nacua plays.
In the Rams’ season opener against the Houston Texans, Nacua needed stitches above his eye after a collision with Texans linebacker Henry To’oTo’o.
“I felt like half of my face had fallen off into my face mask,” Nacua said.
After he was evaluated for a concussion and got stitched up, Nacua came back into the game, catching passes for 19 and 24 yards on that first drive back.
Adams called Nacua “a pit bull” because “it’s hard to stop a pit bull once you get going.”
“That’s clearly what you get from somebody like Puka,” Adams said. “He took a few different shots in that game and bounced up, went and got stitches, got patched up and came back out and kept killing them.
When recounting the hit after the game, Nacua talked about the pride he has in making those tough plays over the middle of the field, saying it made him think of all the times he battled in the backyard against his brothers.
“I think the little brother in me, as much as it is to smile in a defender’s face when you get back up and you catch that ball, it’s also to my big brothers, as well as being like, all those times paid off,” Nacua said.
His brother, Samson, “definitely had a way of pushing my buttons the most” growing up, Nacua said. During Nacua’s rookie season, Samson told ESPN that every chance he and his older brothers got, they were using Nacua as a “tackling dummy.”
“We used to demolish this kid,” Samson said.
It was the “consistent nights of losing in PIG or HORSE or one-on-one” to his brothers that toughened Nacua up, Nacua said.
“I just always wanted to beat him,” Nacua said. “And he never let me win. So there was a lot of moments of throwing tantrums, throwing elbows, and then him dunking. We used to play on a shorter rim so we could dunk and there were a lot of times where I ran into the back of the pole and he didn’t care. .. And so [I learned] to keep getting up because I just want to find a way to win.”
That mindset has no doubt shown up since he got to the NFL. After the Texans game, McVay got a text from a friend who had seen the play.
“He said, ‘Nacua must mix his oatmeal with cement,'” McVay said. “I thought that was a pretty appropriate way of just going into how tough he is.”
THE RAMS RECEIVERS room has a motto: ‘You can’t live forever, so don’t try to.’
It’s a mindset instilled by Yarber, who wants his receivers to come across the middle of the field with no thought other than to catch the football. “Don’t come in there timid,” Yarber said. “If you take the hit, so be it.” It’s a line Yarber remembers his receivers coaches used when he played.
“Sometimes you have to go across the middle and make that play,” Adams said. “You can’t just let a ball soar past your eyes just because you’re in harm’s way. It sounds kind of crazy, but that’s what you signed up for when you want to be a receiver in this league.
“You just have to be fearless in a way and protect yourself if you can. You can get your hands on the balls and cover up as much as you can. Sometimes it’s going to be bang-bang and you’ll get hit and it’s not the prettiest, but that’s kind of what comes with it.”
Nacua said that mindset sets the tone for an offense and “demoralizes the defense for sure.”
“He talks about being the hammer, not the nail,” Yarber said. “And that makes your run after catch that much more violent. DBs don’t want to hit you, they’re going to go low and they lose their technique and stuff like that. So when you’re physical — more physical than them — they don’t want to tackle you.”
But what makes Nacua so good after the catch?
“I think the people that would be best able to articulate it would be the ones trying to tackle him,” McVay said.
