Danny Amendola’s St. Louis Rams Career: Stats, Injuries, and the Years That Built “Playoff ‘Dola”
September 22, 2009. The St. Louis Rams are two games into a season that will end 7-9, playing in a division nobody outside the Pacific Time Zone much cares about. They pull an undrafted wide receiver off the Philadelphia Eagles’ practice squad – a guy who got cut by the Cowboys on Hard Knocks fourteen months earlier, on national television, in a scene that looked like the end of a football career rather than the beginning of one. His name is Danny Amendola. Nobody writes about it. Four years later, Bill Belichick signs him to replace Wes Welker.
The Rams years are the part of Amendola’s story that gets compressed into a single sentence whenever people talk about Super Bowl LI or “Danny Playoff” or the two-point conversion against Atlanta. They shouldn’t be. What happened in St. Louis from 2009 through 2012 – the breakout, the injuries, the collarbone that nearly killed him – is the actual foundation of everything that came after.
How He Got There
The connection between Amendola and the Rams runs through Pat Shurmur. When the Rams hired Shurmur away from Philadelphia to be their offensive coordinator, he brought institutional knowledge of the Eagles’ roster with him – including a small, quick slot receiver sitting on their practice squad. The Rams signed Amendola on September 22, 2009, three weeks into the regular season. He’d spent all of 2008 on the Cowboys’ practice squad after being cut in final roster reductions. Then spent the 2009 preseason on Philadelphia’s practice squad before St. Louis came calling. Two practice squads, zero NFL snaps, and now a shot at an active roster on a team that went 1-15 the previous year. The bar for making an impact was low. Amendola cleared it immediately.
In 14 games that first season, he caught 43 passes for 326 yards and a touchdown operating almost exclusively out of the slot. Those receiving numbers were fine for a first-year player on a bad offense. What actually got people’s attention was the return work: 66 kickoff returns for 1,618 yards, which led the entire NFL. He also added 31 punt returns for 360 yards. On a Rams team quarterbacked in different games by Marc Bulger, Kyle Boller, and Keith Null – yes, Keith Null – Amendola was quietly the most dangerous player they had in the open field.
The 2010 Season Nobody Remembers
Sam Bradford arrived in 2010 as the first overall pick, and the Rams suddenly had a quarterback who could actually get the ball to the slot receiver with any consistency. Amendola responded with the best season of his career. He caught 85 passes for 689 yards and three touchdowns – both career highs at the time. He started six games, up from two the previous year. He returned 50 kickoffs for 1,142 yards and 40 punts for 452 yards. Total all-purpose yards: 2,364. That number led the entire NFL.
Think about what that means. On a 7-9 Rams team that most of America ignored, an undrafted slot receiver from Texas Tech was creating more total yardage than anyone else in the league. More than Darren Sproles. More than Devin Hester. More than any receiver on any of the Super Bowl contenders that year. The Rams went nowhere. Amendola’s performance went largely unnoticed outside St. Louis and fantasy football circles. RotoWire’s profile from that era describes him bluntly: “more quick than fast” and “doesn’t do a whole lot after the catch.” Fair enough. He was still the NFL’s all-purpose yards leader.
Bradford trusted him in ways that mattered. Short routes, crosses, comeback routes against press coverage – the kind of targets that require timing and hands more than athleticism. The 85-catch season was a preview of what Amendola would later do for Tom Brady, where the same qualities made him indispensable on third down. The Rams just didn’t have the surrounding cast to turn any of it into wins.
Two Years That Should Have Ended His Career
Week 1 of 2011, Amendola dislocated his elbow. Season over. He missed 15 of 16 games, underwent surgery to repair triceps damage, and spent the year watching a Rams team go 2-14 without him. Coming off an NFL-leading all-purpose season, the injury wiped out what should have been his contract year. He’d have been a free agent after 2011. Instead he re-signed with St. Louis on a future contract, came back in 2012, and had his best game as a Ram – and then his worst week.
September 16, 2012. Week 2, Washington Redskins at St. Louis. Amendola catches 12 passes in the first half alone, tying Reggie Wayne’s 2007 record for receptions in a half. He finishes with 15 catches for 160 yards and a touchdown – both career highs, the kind of game that puts a player on the national radar. He had 31 receptions through the first two weeks of the season, second in the entire NFL. It looked, finally, like the breakout was real and permanent.
Three weeks later, against the Arizona Cardinals, he dove for a ball in the second quarter. The play looked routine. What happened to his collarbone was not. Instead of dislocating outward – the standard sternoclavicular joint separation – the collarbone moved inward. It came within a few millimeters of puncturing his trachea and aorta. Rams medical staff called around the league looking for comparable cases. Nobody had one. They anesthetized Amendola and manually repositioned the bone. Jeff Fisher, asked about the injury’s severity in the press conference afterward, said only: “If Danny’s going to miss a game, I’ll discuss it at a time at which I’m sure that he’s going to miss a game.” That was Fisher being careful, not cagey – at that point, nobody was sure what “missing games” would even look like relative to what had just happened.
He missed three games. Three. Came back and caught 11 passes for 102 yards against San Francisco. Then hurt his foot against the Jets. Then sat out a week. Then caught one pass for 38 yards against Arizona with the foot still not right. He finished 2012 with 51 catches for 576 yards and two touchdowns across eight games – numbers that, under the circumstances, tell a different story than they appear to. His four Rams seasons total out to 196 receptions, 1,726 yards, and seven touchdowns in 42 games, plus 89 punt returns for 934 yards and 188 kickoffs returned for 2,776 yards.
The Rams never reached the playoffs in any of those four years. Amendola never played a postseason game in St. Louis. His entire Rams career is regular season footage, which is part of why it gets overlooked.
Slot Receiver, Return Specialist, and What That Combination Meant
At 5-foot-11 and 185 pounds, Amendola wasn’t built to beat corners on the outside. He ran precise routes, found the creases in zone coverage, caught everything thrown his way, and could be trusted to hold onto the ball after taking a hit – which happened often given how often he ran underneath routes. On the Rams, that made him a Swiss Army knife: primary slot target on passing downs, featured return man on special teams, occasional rushing option (seven carries for 81 yards in 2010).
The return work specifically is underrated as an indicator of what made him valuable. Leading the league in kickoff return yards in 2009, then combining elite punt and kickoff return numbers in 2010, required the same processing speed and comfort in traffic that made him a reliable slot receiver. He wasn’t just filling two roles – he was good at both for the same reasons. Belichick, who built his rosters around players who could contribute across multiple phases, signed Amendola in March 2013 for exactly this reason. The Rams years were the audition. New England was the job.
Leaving St. Louis – What the Rams Chapter Actually Produced
When Amendola hit free agency in March 2013, the Patriots were looking to replace Welker, who left for Denver. The fit was obvious to anyone who’d watched what Amendola did for Bradford in 2010. New England signed him to a five-year deal. He never matched his 2010 all-purpose total in a single Patriots season, but that was never the point – Belichick used him more selectively, protected him more carefully, and got peak Amendola on the days that mattered most. Two Super Bowl rings. MVP of the 2018 AFC Championship Game. A two-point conversion in Super Bowl LI that tied the game at 28-28 with less than a minute left in regulation.
He retired July 25, 2022, after 13 seasons and five teams – the Rams, Patriots, Dolphins, Lions, and Texans. Career earnings came in just over $38 million. “It was better than I could have ever imagined,” he told Adam Schefter. In 2023 he joined the Las Vegas Raiders as a coaching assistant focused on returners, which makes a certain kind of sense given that his return work in St. Louis was where a lot of this started.
The 2010 Rams season – 85 catches, 689 yards, 2,364 all-purpose yards, NFL leader – never made Amendola a star. The team around him was too limited, the market too small, and the injuries that followed too immediate. But that season is the reason the Patriots called. The clavicle that nearly killed him in 2012, and the three games he missed before returning to play through it, is the reason Belichick trusted him in January when the games got hard. The St. Louis years look like a footnote. They were the whole argument.
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