Vikings cornerback NaJee Thompson is unquestionably the fastest player on the team. He set the state record in the 200-meter dash growing up in his native South Carolina, which explains why Thompson recently was clocked running 22.6 mph during a game. As he put it, “My whole life is just speed, speed, speed.”

That speed was undeniable on New Year’s Eve as Thompson made the splashiest play for the Vikings in an otherwise forgettable 33-10 home loss to the Green Bay Packers.

Though the outcome had already been decided, Thompson didn’t let that impact his effort. He raced downfield in punt coverage, forced a muff with his pressure, then recovered the fumble. A couple of plays later, the Vikings scored their only touchdown of the game.

“I was locked in,” said Thompson, an undrafted free agent, who has become a special-teams ace for the Vikings. “I needed to make sure that they felt me and they understood that I’m not going anywhere for a long time.”

This is exactly the type of player Thompson said he was going to be when he was starting out at Georgia Southern.

“I told a lot of kids when I was in college that I’m going to go play in the league because of special teams,” Thompson said. “Just kept working at it over and over. I never played a true position. If they needed me on offense, I played offense. If they needed me on defense, I played defense.”

None of it mattered as long as he could also play special teams.

That passion helped land Thompson an NFL job after he got passed over in the 2023 draft. Ultimately, the Vikings signed him as an undrafted free agent, and special-teams coordinator Matt Daniels immediately found himself gravitating to Thompson in training camp.

There were a number of splash plays from Thompson during the exhibition schedule, and while he made the team because of them, he found himself sitting out as a healthy scratch a couple of month ago.

“That’s kind of where it clicked for him,” Daniels said. “We had a great conversation about how he did get a little complacent. He made the team and those first few weeks he was getting down there and he wasn’t making a play. At that point we kind of decided to sit him down and give somebody else an opportunity who could finish.”

After not suiting up in Week 7 or Week 8, Thompson made his return to the lineup with a newfound focus.

” It gave him an opportunity to kind of see the bigger picture of what he needed to work on,” Daniels said. “He had to understand that this is a revolving door in terms of who’s in and who’s out. You can never feel like that spot is going to be solidified. He kind of took that and ran with it.”

Literally. As for the splash play Thompson made in punt coverage against the Packers, Daniels said the most impressive part was how he finished.

“To be able to shoot the shot, force the muff, and quickly get off the ground before the returner is able to recover the ball, it’s probably the top play of the year in terms of the impact it had,” Daniels said. “Obviously the game was a little bit out of hand. It was clear as day that this guy is still going 100 mph. He wants to pour everything into it because it’s important to him.”

That’s a understatement.

“That’s what I look forward to every week,” Thompson said. “I put a lot of extra work into it.”

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