MANKATO — Rodney Adams sat down inside a Winter Park team meeting room and looked up at himself.
Mike Priefer, the Vikings special teams coordinator, queued up video of a 97-yard kickoff return Adams scored against Navy. Adams was at Vikings headquarters for an April job interview — a pre-draft top 30 visit — when the mood tightened for a brief second.
"I said, 'You know I'm a Naval Academy graduate, right?' And I'm dead serious," Priefer recalled. "We don't know each other yet. He looked at me like, is this guy serious? Deadpanned, it was beautiful. I started laughing and, of course, he started laughing."
Would this mark the beginning of a career for another Pro Bowl kick returner for the Vikings?
A month later, the Vikings made Adams a fifth-round pick. Yet the shoes he has to fill are much larger than your typical mid-round pick. The 22-year-old receiver from South Florida is first in line to pick up where Percy Harvin and Cordarrelle Patterson left off with eight years of big kickoff returns and touchdowns.
If Adams' untouched sprint against Navy in 2015 is any indication, they may have found a gem.
"He always gets on me about it," Adams said of Priefer. "That's probably my most memorable return there. I bring it up to him all the time."
The Vikings didn't push this offseason to keep Patterson, the dynamic 2013 first-round pick who didn't quite develop as a receiver in four years and left for Oakland. The team instead turned its attention to the draft, where Adams' 4.4-second speed in the 40-yard dash caught many eyes.