Thielen, Ham go down as two of the great Minnesota outliers

Adam Thielen and CJ Ham retired together at TCO Performance Center

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By Matthew Coller

EAGAN — My second day as a Minnesota Vikings reporter was strange and memorable.

The atmosphere at US Bank Stadium on September 1, 2016 was muted because Teddy Bridgewater had just suffered a career-altering knee injury at practice during the week. Rather than the final preseason game being treated as a party for Teddy and a Vikings squad that won the division the previous year, fans were somber and unsure about what was going to happen to the season and future of the franchise.

During the game against the Los Angeles Rams, general manager Rick Spielman held an impromptu press conference in the press box. He declared his belief in Shaun Hill as the team’s starting quarterback and gave an update on Teddy’s condition.

I hustled back to my brand new press box seat and pulled up an email with directions on how to post to 1500ESPN.com and started transcribing everything Spielman had said. I batted story angles back and forth with Judd Zulgad and started blasting out quotes as fast as possible.

It was almost impossible to pay attention to anything related to the game when the next move at QB was going to determine so much about 2016 and beyond.

But there was one play that made me stop typing like a madman for a second. Running back CJ Ham, a local D-II kid, scored a touchdown. I remember thinking that one of the great things about preseason football was that a guy with zero chance of ever making the NFL could have an opportunity to get cheers from his hometown stadium in front of all of his friends and family. When he becomes a gym teacher, he’ll be able to show the kids his jersey and the highlight on YouTube of him scoring a touchdown, I figured.

A few days later, I was inside the Vikings locker room at Winter Park for the first time. I was looking for Laquon Treadwell. I wanted to ask the first-rounder about his journey from suffering one of the most horrific injuries you will ever see in college to preparing for his first game as a Viking.

Across the locker room, the rest of the media gathered around another wide receiver. Adam Thielen held court with a handful of cameras and half dozen folks holding out recorders to catch his every word.

I was only just learning the roster at that point and quickly pulled his stats up on my phone. Uh. Why are they talking to a guy with 12 catches last year?

“Local angle,” I was told.

Ah, the kid from Mankato. Match made in heaven for local news. I wasn’t here for that. I was here to work for the ESPN affiliate and write about the players who mattered — like Laquon Treadwell.

Certainly you could take a lesson from this that you should never judge an athlete by where they came from or underestimate anybody who’s made it that far. Although, the alternate interpretation could be that the chances that Ham and Thielen would be retiring 10 years later as two of the most respected Vikings players of the last decade were about one in a million back in 2016.

On Thursday afternoon inside TCO Performance Center, friends and family and many of the same local news folks from 10 years ago gathered for a ceremony to celebrate Ham and Thielen’s retirements. Doing the event together was such a good touch. They might be on different ends of the spectrum in terms of offensive production and national recognition with Thielen being star receiver for multiple years and Ham going under the radar as a fullback and special teamer but they don’t think of each other as stat sheets. They are brothers.

“To be able to do this with my guy CJ… we spend a lot of time together in this building, but we've actually also spent a lot of time training together outside this building,” Thielen said to open his speech. “To be able to do this with him — a special football player, and even better person and somebody who has really helped shape me, even though he's younger than me, has has really mentored me in my faith walk as an unbelievable example. So, good to do this with you, buddy.”

Over the many years that they played together, they developed a special bond. Between their faith, their love for basketball, their families and their shared experiences as underdogs, Ham and Thielen grew up together. They were there for the Minneapolis Miracle, the playoff win in New Orleans, the downfall of the Zimmer era, the 13-win season that featured all-time great comebacks in Buffalo and against Indianapolis. There were a lot of special moments and a lot of heartbreaks and tough times along the way.

During Thielen’s speech, he was startled by a rush of emotion when talking about his parents’ role in his success. He had to step back from the lectern for a moment, noting that he never cries, except at weddings, so this was unusual for him.

We told Thielen’s story so many times along the way that it became almost meme worthy. Did you know he’s from Detroit Lakes? Did you know he almost played basketball instead? Did you know that his Mankato coaches didn’t even recommend him to the Vikings when they gave him a tryout?

Amidst his breakout 2017 season, there was a conga line of national reporters dropping by Winter Park to tell the tale of Thielen. We ended up giving him the Korey Stringer Media Good Guy award that year because he continued to still give the local media all the time we needed despite the big boys rolling in with the aim to write the next great underdog feature story.

But we should never lose sight of how insane it is that Thielen went from Division-II to an NFL practice squad to fifth all-time in Vikings history in receiving yards only behind Cris Carter, Randy Moss, Justin Jefferson and Anthony Carter.

Think about how many players go to Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, Michigan, USC, Penn State etc. that never get a sniff of an NFL game. During the course of Thielen’s career, think about how many wide receivers came in as draft picks or undrafted free agents from these schools and never came close to beating him out. Treadwell and Cordarrelle Patterson watched from the sidelines as Mr. Mankato ran a double move against the Houston Texans in his 2016 breakout game.

My first story about Thielen’s emergence came after that seven-catch, 127-yard performance. The angle was about undrafted players. I went to every undrafted guy in the locker room and asked them how they made it. When I talked with Thielen, I recall feeling like he had no explanation for it either. Not that he didn’t know he was good or competitive or hard working but there was no secret sauce that he could come up with. It was too difficult to see the things that made the Thielen story happen when he was in the moment, trying to beat the Bears.

I’ve continued wondering what he thought about that ever since.

Ham opened up his speech with a couple of dad jokes.

“What do you call a pony that has a sore throat? A little horse,” he deadpanned.

He used to occasionally get called upon to do a press conference back in the day and that was his way of breaking the ice since he was the farthest thing from a self promoter.

Through my years covering him, me and the Duluth TV reporter led the league in asking Ham questions. Every time I would walk up to him in the locker room, there was a look on his face like, “you again?”

The reason for that is that I have a fascination and deep admiration for the fullback position. It’s always been so interesting to me that fullbacks are amongst the most admired people in a locker room and the least celebrated on the field. They have also been a dying breed since about 2010, which is odd because some of the greatest offenses in NFL history had key fullbacks.

If you ever get a chance to watch Emmitt Smith’s Hall of Fame induction speech, he sobs uncontrollably when talking about his fullback Daryl Johnston. Can you think of anything that better explains why football is so special than an all-time great superstar being overcome with emotion at the mere mention of his lead blocker?

Ham isn’t just an outlier, he’s a survivor. He came into the NFL with Norv Turner and then he played for Pat Shurmur, John DeFilippo, Kevin Stefanski, Gary Kubiak, Klint Kubian and Kevin O’Connell. Sometimes he’s been a big part of the offense, sometimes we wondered if he’d be on the chopping block.

That was especially the case with O’Connell. He came from a Rams offense that had turned its nose up at the beefy boys in the backfield. At first, it looked like he really didn’t know how to use Ham. At the time, that offense loved 11 personnel and single-back sets. So he popped in during short-yardage stuff — where KOC threw the ball anyway — and occasionally popped him out into the flat for a first down or rammed him up the middle at the goal line.

But in 2023, O’Connell had an idea. What about using Ham as a pass protecting specialist?

Ham flipped the switch, going from the hammer that played 262 run blocking snaps to lead Dalvin Cook to 1,500+ yards in 2020 to the guy stepping up in the hole and sticking Fred Warner in place on third-and-long. In 2023, Ham ranked as PFF’s seventh best pass blocking RB/FB and last year he was fifth.

You might think: Why not? He’s a big, tough dude. He should be able to do that easily. Well, not so fast. Defenses are now more complicated than ever in terms of their stunts and blitz packages. Simulated pressures are the norm. Edge rushers and linebackers line up on the interior. Corners and safeties rush from the second level. And third down is when they all feast. Yet out of 147 pass blocking snaps from 2023-2025, Ham gave up just 12 QB pressures.

Another thing you might overlook is special teams. Everybody shrugs their shoulders on special teams until your team is making a catastrophic error on ‘teams that costs them a game. Over the last nine seasons, Ham has been on the field for 2,282 special teams plays. According to PFF, he’s missed three tackles that entire time. He also blocked a punt in 2024.

Just like with Thielen, think about the number of players who would sell all their worldly possessions to get 5,500 snaps in the NFL. Yet these are the two that made it. Undrafted. No team from any other state would have given them a chance but their own. Crazy.

So as I was thinking about all of this as I was sitting inside the auditorium inside TCO Performance Center watching Thielen and Ham talk about what it all meant to them.

I have been to a number of these retirement press conferences and the vibe is usually the same. Players are grateful for their opportunities, thankful for all the coaches who helped them along the way and appreciative of a top-notch organization with a great fan base that embraced them. This one was a little different though.

It still takes a heck of a person and player to become a Pro Bowler as a first or second-round draft pick like Anthony Barr or Kyle Rudolph but this one is different. As Thielen and Ham’s speeches went on, I kept thinking about the question that I posed to Thielen back in 2017 and how he couldn’t really articulate exactly why he’d surpassed so many contenders.

Now that it’s over and they have had time to reflect, I wondered if Thielen and Ham could finally see why they had been such outliers.

So I asked.

For Ham, it was about focusing on whatever task was at hand and not worrying about anything else.

“I think just being willing to do what's necessary, not letting the thought of what your purpose is dictate the way that you move,” Ham said. “I think purpose is truly just being obedient to where you are and what you have in front of you. And I think for both of us, as we had to become special teamers before we even got a shot, like, we both knew, ‘Hey, yes, we want to be, such and such someday but my purpose right now is what the coaches are asking me to do. How can I help this team?’”

Ham continued…

“Every year that changes, you just never know. Even with, with KO, our first year together, I didn't play a whole lot on the offense, we were still working that out, trying to figure that out. And as the year's gone, like, yes, I started playing more on offense, but then I also had to find, like, where does this team need value? And once I find that, I gotta make sure I do everything in my power to make sure I'm the person to bring that value. And we were able to do that.”

Thielen was also willing to take on the grind early in his career, playing over 500 special teams snaps between 2014 and 2015.

But in order to take things to another level as a starting wide receiver, he needed a different type of competitive drive.

“I would say mindset, right? Like, what is your mindset? And it's this, I call it a dog mentality, you cannot be denied,” Thielen explained. “I felt like that was where I felt like I had an advantage over other guys as well. I wasn't gonna be denied. And sometimes it maybe came across the wrong way but it was this mentality that every single day, I'm gonna prepare so that when it's game day, I don't gotta think I can just go. And I can have this different mentality, this little switch that I could turn on, and be a different person. I always said that when you cross those lines, like, you're not, you're not Adam Thielen, dad, at home with the kids. Like, you're a different person. You have to be. You have to have a different mindset.”

Thielen continued…

“And that mindset can't just be on Sundays. Like, it's Wednesday practice. Like, when everybody else is maybe going through the motions, I treated those like game day, and I was just as mad at a bad player, a drop or missed assignment on Wednesdays, I was on game day, and that was where I felt like I could separate myself from others.”

Those were the explanations I was looking for way back when. But it strikes me in that room that there’s more to it than that. Players will talk about a “support system.” All the folks in the room that gathered for Ham and Thielen’s retirement celebration all have a piece in their success as much as their own drive and will to succeed. There are a lot of pitfalls that can take down careers but the people in their lives would not let them fall.

“Before our game against Seattle our mental performance coach, Matt, asked all of us to just close our eyes and just picture, in a circle around you, all the people that have meant the most to you in your life,” Ham said. “People who taught you lessons and just been there for you. And as I close my eyes, many of the people that are here in this room… So I'm just filled with gratitude.”

You also need teammates to guide and push you. It’s not a coincidence that Ham and Thielen spent so much time together off the field and both ended up as the Vikings’ Walter Payton Man of the Year nominees.

Walking out of TCO Performance Center as Thielen and Ham’s family and friends took pictures with them, I was thinking about how everyone from the Minneapolis Miracle is now gone (if Harrison Smith retires). It was an era defined by a lot of great stories and close calls. Even if they didn’t ultimately win the Super Bowl in Minnesota, players like Thielen and Ham are what make football so special. They are the embodiment of the idea that if you put enough into something and do things the right way, you will be rewarded. Because of that, they are two players Vikings fans (or the reporters that got to tell their stories) will never forget.

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