WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — When the Los Angeles Rams’ defense is reeling after giving up a play, when it’s gassed and searching for life again, 10 players in blue all know where to look.
They turn to the middle of the unit, where a linebacker has a fist in the air.
Nate Landman just arrived this season. He doesn’t know where these men have been in the past, their triumphs or their scars. But he’s the one leading where they want to go, a dream he now shares.
“It takes a long time to earn respect in a grown man’s locker room,” Landman said. “You do that by being yourself.”
The march continues Saturday in Carolina in a wild-card playoff battle. A rematch as physical as this one against the Panthers is going to test everything the Rams bet on Landman as a free agent, and again with a midseason extension. It’s all that fury he unleashes on the football when it’s in a player’s arms, distilled into a game with the season on the line.
But his journey began an ocean away, in a place none of his teammates could have guessed.
A little over two decades ago, Landman was a toddler running around on a continent that didn’t have football.
He was born in Harare, Zimbabwe. It’s a distinction he currently shares with one other NFL player, Andrew Mukuba of the Philadelphia Eagles.
Zimbabwe is where Landman’s parents grew up and then met, and where his father, Shaun, played rugby for the Zimbabwe national team. Shaun passed along a variety of athletic genes to his three kids, who would often play outside to exhaust their energy. That is, until a job opportunity in San Francisco opened the door to a new life in America.
It was there that Landman began playing football and learned about the roots that preceded this journey. His memories of Zimbabwe were nonexistent, but the photographs, African furniture, wood carvings and Shona tribe songs playing in the house all made clear to Landman and his siblings where their childhoods began.
As a kid in California, those roots became his way to stand out, and he’d tuck them away as a trivia tidbit anytime he met new people.
“Nobody would ever believe it,” Landman said. “An 8-year-old kid saying he’s from Africa in America, people don’t believe it right off the top.”
Blessed with the genes of a professional rugby player, the Landman children all found their athletic pursuits in American sports. His brother, Brendan, would go on to play tight end at Arizona State. His sister, Ocean, would become a swimmer at Oregon State.
Nate fell into football. He was drawn to the physicality, the adrenaline, the passion displayed with hits and speeches, and the ways words and fury can weave a story together. From the moment he started in middle school, his goal was to be the vocal leader on every team he played for, which helped build a natural fit as a middle linebacker.
He excelled in that respect, rising to a three-star prospect at Monte Vista High in Danville, Calif., before committing to the University of Colorado. And he excelled with the Buffaloes, racking up 100-tackle seasons in 2018 and 2019 before playing just 13 games the next two years due to COVID-19 interruptions and injuries.
He was still trying to find himself then, which meant tapping back into his roots by getting a tattoo of Africa on his chest, with an outline of Zimbabwe.
Before entering the NFL, Nate Landman got a tattoo of Africa on his chest. (Nate Landman’s Instagram)
But he entered the NFL as an undrafted free agent, looking not only for a home but also for a playing style that would catch coaches’ attention. It was hard to find as a rookie with the Atlanta Falcons in 2022, when he played just 22 defensive snaps.
But that next offseason became life-changing. The Falcons had a lane for him to start at middle linebacker. And he decided to travel back to South Africa and Zimbabwe for the first time, to gather his first real memories of the place that shaped him.
He drove through the streets of Cape Town, with traffic flowing in the opposite direction. He toured Victoria Falls, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. He fished in the Zambezi River. He went on a houseboat on Lake Kariba. He did the activities he saw in those dated pictures in the photo album at home, now as a grown man with a career to chase that was hard to explain to the people of this place.
“It’s whatever you picture Africa to be: humble beginnings, third-world country, smaller cities … wild animals and beautiful sunsets and beautiful rivers,” Landman said. “It felt like home.”
Landman planned to return every two years, but it didn’t work out when the time came last spring. He was a free agent again, and the Falcons weren’t bringing him back. He needed shoulder surgery, which would complicate a three-week trip and the activities he wanted to try again.
He and his wife, Brynna, had so much to figure out in their American lives before they could untangle the roots some more. He needed someone here to believe in him, both in his game and the place he wears on his chest. He realized pretty quickly that the next time he’d return would be different — as a changed man, as an evolved football player and hopefully with a name people knew.
The Rams love placing bets on the smallest-risk players on defense, with hopes of a greater payoff. That’s what they saw in Landman when they had an opening after Christian Rozeboom, now a starting linebacker for the Panthers, hit free agency — and after they traded Ernest Jones IV to Tennessee the year before.
One scout saw something bigger in Landman than his plays typically represented. And he had a coach in his corner in Jimmy Lake, who was an assistant for the Rams in 2023 before becoming the Falcons’ defensive coordinator in 2024 and being fired after one year. Lake returned to the Rams as a senior defensive assistant this season.
They signed Landman to a one-year deal at the league minimum of $1.24 million. But they had a starting spot ready for him at a position of need on a team with Super Bowl aspirations after falling just short in the divisional round against the eventual champion Philadelphia Eagles.
One of the first ways Rams coach Sean McVay introduced Landman to his new team was on a projector.
In a team-wide meeting, he put up clips on the screen, as he does with many new signings. But these highlights quickly went beyond the run fits and sure-tackling many were expecting from a new middle linebacker.
There was Landman, rushing over to players who were wrapped up. His right hand would form a fist as he’d punch at the brown leather in the ball carrier’s arms. Six times in two years, he punched a football out onto the turf.
“It was just forced fumble after forced fumble, and if it wasn’t a forced fumble, it was a punch,” defensive end Kobie Turner said. “In training camp, it started to come to life, and I was like, ‘Man, this guy is the truth.’”
It’s a trick that wasn’t always in his game. He forced four fumbles in five seasons in college. It started on the Falcons, first as a conversation with safety Jessie Bates III. All of a sudden, they were watching film of Charles Tillman’s “Peanut Punch” with the Chicago Bears in the mid-2000s and of Shaquille Leonard’s record for turnovers accounted for with the Indianapolis Colts the previous season.
“We would always talk to each other about hunting the ball. The tackle doesn’t really matter. Go get the ball,” Bates said.
Nate Landman, who has forced 10 fumbles in the past three seasons, began mastering the punchout during his second year in Atlanta. (Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
Even in practice settings, they discovered something in a punch at the ball that not even the most bone-crushing tackles could create.
“Once you have that mindset, it is kind of contagious,” Bates said. “It’s good for everybody. When I’m out there practicing, I’m forcing myself to get those punches in and then everybody is looking around like, ‘Why am I not punching the ball?’ When you get the ball, it’s good for everybody. It’s good for your family, it’s good for the DC, it’s good for your team.”
He didn’t know it back when it started, but Landman would need all of that when his prove-it opportunity arrived with the Rams.
Yes, Los Angeles needed better run defense after watching its season end with Saquon Barkley’s 60-plus-yard rushing highlights. But what has always energized the league’s lowest-paid defense the most was the ability to, as McVay constantly preaches, steal momentum back from an opponent. Nothing does that better than a turnover.
But after last season, the Rams knew offenses were going to do everything in their power to keep Jared Verse from wrecking the quarterback. Those offenses would counter with the run game, which would not only theoretically minimize risk but would also invite the payoff of those explosive runs Barkley enjoyed.
This was a secret weapon potentially hiding in plain sight, in the middle of a defense, at a position many teams write off in a passing league. But the Rams players needed to see it for themselves, too.
Then came Week 1, in a tight defensive battle against the Houston Texans at SoFi Stadium. Los Angeles had held C.J. Stroud and Houston outside of its territory for the entire second half until a final drive that crept near field goal range in a five-point game.
Stroud dumped the ball to running back Dare Ogunbowale, who turned to find Landman facing him head-on inside the 20. As he dove to the turf, Landman didn’t look to just make a tackle. Instead, he fired his fist into the football like he had a score to settle.
The ball popped loose and into the arms of defensive end Braden Fiske. And the defense rallied around Landman, their newest leader, who needed one week to make a play to secure his first win with the Rams.
What a play by Nate Landman to force the fumble 😳
HOUvsLAR on CBS/Paramount+https://t.co/HkKw7uXVnt pic.twitter.com/xrmMof58ca
— NFL (@NFL) September 7, 2025
That play has persisted this season, as Landman is up to a career-high four forced fumbles to go along with career highs in tackles (132), tackles for loss (eight) and sacks (2.5). He recovered a strip-sack from Byron Young to set up the game-sealing touchdown to beat the Titans in Week 2.
Each time he makes a big highlight, he gets a message from an old friend in Bates, checking in on the manifestation.
By midseason, the result was a three-year extension from the Rams worth $22.5 million, with $15.7 million guaranteed. It’s rare for Los Angeles to hand out any midseason extension, much less to pay a linebacker, but McVay said the Rams wanted to be serious about showing players that he is who they want others to become.
“Now he’s been there and done that,” defensive coordinator Chris Shula said. “He’s made plays to win games, and he’s made plays in big games. He plays consistently every single week. He has the production to match all that leadership talk that he does.”
He’s played and started all 17 games this season, and he has been on the field for 91 percent of the snaps. He leads the team in tackles. Though tackling has been stronger from Landman when safety Quentin Lake has been on the field and less so without his backup and coordination teammate, the hope now is that the two can combine forces again, with Lake back for the first time since a Week 11 elbow injury.
“Seeing his progression, there’s no reason he can’t be one of the top linebackers in this league,” Lake said.
The eyes are on them to coordinate a defense that can do what it couldn’t the last time it played the Panthers — stop the run and force turnovers.
That punch is loading up again.
“You step in between the white lines, and you’ve got to become a different person,” Landman said. “It’s war on the field.”