During the Super Bowl weekend, LA Rams receiver Puka Nacua was spotted drunk. In a now-viral video, he can be seen jumping around in the streets while clearly inebriated. A friend then redirects him to his car, where he jumps in like a cartoon character.
Advertisement
Truth be told, it’s a pretty hilarious video of Nacua. Most sports fans have had one too many drinks while watching the Super Bowl at some point, and that’s exactly what happened to the receiver while he was out on the town.
However, this comes after two months of Nacua consistently making headlines for the wrong reasons. First, there was his stream with Adin Ross, where he made an antisemitic gesture. Then, he tweeted a laughing emoji with the name “Sam Darnold” moments after the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl, possibly making fun of the QB’s performance in the game.
The controversial moments are beginning to pile up for Nacua, and NFL analyst Emmanuel Acho is getting worried for his future.
“I remember it wasn’t all of a sudden; it was subtle. What ended as a flood [that] started out as a puddle,” Acho began during a recent episode of his podcast, Speakeasy. “We’re seeing the puddle with Puka Nacua. Money doesn’t change you; money just makes you more of who you are.”
The saying describes how people can slowly and methodically drift away from being a good person. All it takes is a few minor shifts in behavior or a lack of conviction.
This could be what we’re seeing with Nacua. After all, we’ve seen unexpected phenoms at wide receiver go off the rails in the past. It’s exactly what happened to Antonio Brown, as Acho pointed out.
“AB was not always a wild boy,” Acho pointed out. “Not when he first came into the league, because I knew people who knew him who asked AB to babysit their kid. And AB was chill, he came into the league as like a free undrafted or 6th round pick out of Central Michigan.”
Many speculate that repeated concussions and hits to the head derailed Brown’s personality and career. But others, like Acho’s co-host LeSean McCoy, argue that he was always that way. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
The parallels between Nacua and Brown are concerning. However, nothing egregious has happened yet with the Rams receiver. The worst came when he made the antisemitic gesture, but he has since apologized, saying he didn’t know what he was doing and thought it meant something completely different.
At the end of the day, Nacua’s recent drunken escapade wasn’t the best look, especially given his current situation. But he’s only 24 years old, and if he wants to get drunk, he has every right to. He seemed like he was just trying to have some fun and let his hair down on Super Bowl weekend. If some see that as a troubling sign for his future, so be it. Nacua probably couldn’t care less.
