After 11 Snaps, Jamal Adams' Season Is Over, and Everyone Agrees It Was Worth It

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — On Saturday, the Minnesota Vikings got to watch their new safety play 11 snaps of football, and that was enough. Eleven snaps. A full season’s worth of narrative compressed into roughly four minutes of coverage, one blue medical tent, and a season that is now, officially, over before it started.

Jamal Adams, 30, signed with the Vikings last month from the New York Jets — a move that was received with the kind of energy a veteran free-agent safety can muster, which is to say, politely — and on Saturday he played his first preseason game for his new team. The Vikings won, 13-10, over the New York Giants, in what the team described as “a competitive effort.” Adams, for his part, played 11 defensive snaps and then sat down, in a medical sense, for the rest of the year with a right knee injury that the team has described as season-ending.

The number has entered the record books. Not as a tackle total. Not as an interception count. As a full season.

The scene was, by all accounts, orderly. Adams went down on one of his 11 snaps, was carted to the blue medical tent on the MetLife turf, and was carried back onto the field under his own power, which is the NFL’s way of saying the knee made the decision before the player did. Head coach Kevin O’Connell, asked about it, said the news was “not good,” an assessment the team called “honest but brief.” By Sunday, the diagnosis was confirmed, and the Vikings’ season plan for its newest safety was, in the words of one team source, “a footnote.”

The Jets, for their part, issued a statement expressing “regret and respect,” and a former Jets fan in Section 214 said he had “already processed it,” because, he said, “you learn to do that fast in this building.” An analyst on a national broadcast called the 11 snaps “a complete sample,” which is the sports-media way of saying that eleven is, technically, a number.

What is not in dispute is that Adams’ career has now played out in three chapters: the Jets, the Vikings, and the medical tent. At 30, with 11 snaps and a season-ending injury between him and the next chapter, he has become, in the words of one Vikings fan who bought a ticket specifically for the preseason game, “the most complete story of the summer.”

At press time, the Vikings had not announced a replacement at safety, the Jets had not announced a reunion, and the number 11 had been retired by exactly no one, which fans on both sides of the Hudson felt was the right call.