Vikings receiver Adam Thielen rose from below the NFL radar to stardom

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There are moments, in Adam Thielen’s dizzying climb from overlooked prospect to practice squad player to special teams standout to Pro Bowler, that the Vikings wide receiver will allow himself to peer over the edge of the mountain and think back to how easy it could have been for none of this to happen.
“When I look back at it, I’m actually more nervous now than I was in the moment [at the Vikings’ 2013 rookie camp], ” Thielen said. “Now I realize, [if] two plays [go] differently — I drop a ball instead of making a diving catch or something like that — I don’t get the opportunity. In the moment, I was just playing football, and I was probably a little naive to what the opportunity actually was.”
It wasn’t that Thielen couldn’t play. He was the receiver at Detroit Lakes who made a play whenever a run-first offense needed one, the young wideout at Minnesota State Mankato who’d somehow lead the team in catches every week, even when the game plan wasn’t designed to feed him the ball. But the system isn’t built to keep players like Thielen from falling through the cracks...


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Asked how Thielen the Vikings receiver would evaluate Thielen the college prospect, the 27-year-old laughed and said, “I’d say [there was] a lot of work to do.
“I think I was pretty skilled as far as being able to run routes pretty well — not great, but good enough — and I had good ball skills and things like that. But I was pretty lengthy, and pretty weak, and probably not as fluid as I needed to be. It was kind of a progression.”

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Even after his rookie combine performance, Thielen looked as if he might not get a shot. He had lined up a job selling supplies at Patterson Dental, while hoping he’d get a tryout somewhere. Keen kept calling Vikings scout Mike Sholiton, whom he’d coached at Washington University, to make Thielen’s case.
All it yielded was a rookie camp tryout with the Vikings; it turned out that was all Thielen needed. The Vikings released Eastern Washington receiver Nicholas Edwards, whom they’d signed as an undrafted free agent, to make room for Thielen.
“The whole time, I’m holding a graduate assistant position open for him, because I would have loved to have him coaching our receivers,” Keen said. “I think he realized at the time just what a rarity it is [to be signed after a rookie camp tryout].”
If Thielen’s path from small-town Minnesota to the core of the Vikings roster can be mimicked, Brandon Zylstra will be the one to try.
The New London-Spicer graduate was a tight end at Concordia (Moorhead) before playing two years as a receiver for the Edmonton Eskimos and leading the CFL with 1,687 yards on 100 catches last season. He signed a reserve/futures deal with the Vikings that included significantly more guaranteed money than most CFL players receive.
Zylstra shares an agent, Blake Baratz, with Thielen, and plans to train with him this spring.
“I’m hoping we can be together, so I can pick his brain a little more,” Zylstra said. “It’s really just encouraging, for somebody to prove it can be done. It really doesn’t matter where you come from.”
It probably does, if the NFL’s player procurement machine is viewed as a whole. But it didn’t for Thielen in his remarkable journey into pro football.