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Cheers to the bag-getting all-star that Davante Adams shoved, while Ron Rivera should save some blame for himself

Welcome to this week’s edition of Four Verts! A photographer is working his way into a nice payday and a couple of older coaches are having contrasting experiences this season. Let’s dive in.

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Man what a come up for that guy who got hit by Davante Adams

Winning the lottery has to be an incredible feeling. It doesn’t even have to be the Super Duper Billion Dollar Hunger Games lottery, just a little something that can keep a person going for a few years. Not to go overboard in making light of the guy who got shoved by Las Vegas Raiders receiver Davante Adams, but wow what a time to fall into some serious cash.

Adams pushed a random guy on the ground who happened to be in his way after the Raiders lost a close game, where they blew a 17-0 lead to a divisional rival. It might be the accidental come up of the year. Adams seemed to immediately realize that he was in hot water because he apologized twice after the game. Not directly to the guy, but he did in the media conference following the game and again on Twitter, where he hoped that his message would reach the man he pushed.

This is one of the more hot-headed acts that we’ve recently seen on an NFL field. This is way different than what happened with Bobby Wagner and the guy who ran on the field during Monday Night Football last week. This was after the game, and the guy Adams shoved was just trying to get wherever he needed to be. Minding his own business and he got wrecked by an angry all-world athlete after the game.

It appears the guy who was on the receiving end of Adams’ rage knows the game plan for this situation. Get. The. Bag.

Our unlikely main character has filed a complaint with the police and released a statement on his health, saying that he preliminarily has non-life threatening injuries. That’s how you gotta play it. I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to guess that the man doesn’t have any non-life threatening injuries. He got up right after Adams shoved him, but it’s all about playing the game here. If he plays the game right, he can be in for a good chunk of change he didn’t previously have.

The Kansas City police department announced Wednesday that Adams was charged with misdemeanor assault. He’s not going to go to prison, he’s too rich for that, but it does set an annoying legal battle for him moving forward.

This act doesn’t mean that Adams is an irredeemable jerk or anything, he just made a bad mistake in a heated moment. It was dumb, but forgivable. It’s not like Adams is a player who has a history of this. We can move on from this story without making grand accusations about his character. He tried to apologize, even if the execution of that apology was similar to the Raiders’ last offensive play of Monday’s game. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, so we can examine where this is kind of funny.

Man, I hope Davante Adams doesn’t see this.

Ron Rivera is as much to blame for the Commanders struggles as Carson Wentz

The Washington Commanders (1-4) stink. That much is painfully obvious. They’ve barely put together a watchable product through the first five weeks of the season and it’s clear they’re one of the worst teams in the league.

When Commanders head coach Ron Rivera was asked about why they’ve fallen so far behind in the NFC East, Rivera blamed it on their quarterback play. Carson Wentz has largely been a disaster this year and he won’t be the franchise quarterback for the foreseeable future, but he isn’t the only one to blame for such a hapless season.

Rivera, the same person who made those comments, has a huge hand in how the Commanders' season has gone to this point. He walked back his comments about Wentz and said that he had a “bad day,” but this season has his stink all over it. Rivera has become too comfortable with familiarity over results. Jack Del Rio, the defensive coordinator who came to Washington with Rivera in 2020, still hasn’t figured out how to effectively defend the modern passing game. Andrew Norwell and Trai Turner played for Rivera in Carolina and have struggled when they’ve been on the field. Curtis Samuel hasn’t been the weapon the Commanders were expecting him to be when they signed him in free agency from the Panthers, either.

It's been staggering to watch Rivera’s unwillingness to drastically change his operations as he continues to fail in the same ways that led to his downfall in Carolina. This roster might be overrated in terms of the name-brand-talent-to-actual-production ratio, but they are playing way beneath the total sum of their parts. That comes back on the coach.

If Rivera wants to compare his situation to the rest of the division, he needs to start looking at the job that the coaches are doing. Philadelphia's Nick Sirianni has figured out how to coordinate one of the best offenses in the NFL by building it around the strengths and limitations of a unique quarterback in Jalen Hurts. The New York Giants' Brian Daboll has been scraping together extremely stressful wins, but he’s solved crucial puzzles at critical points in games — like how to run a quarterback-less offense in the NFL (thank you, Saquon Barkley). Dallas' Mike McCarthy and Dan Quinn have made life easy on Cooper Rush by limiting what he can do on offense and having a dominating defense on the back end.

The Commanders clearly have a quarterback problem, but the guy who isn’t providing any solutions on how to work around it shouldn’t be criticizing his starter for the entire world to hear. That street runs two ways. Rivera hasn’t been good enough at this job to be taking shots at anyone. His formula has become stale and unless he changes something about his approach, the Commanders will certainly have someone else leading their inevitable rebuild in 2023.