Jamal Adams signing with the Vikings on the eve of training camp is the funniest correct roster move of the whole offseason, and the joke isn’t even the position change everyone’s about to make it about.
Adams broke it himself last night, kept it short and to the point.
https://x.com/Prez/status/2081901218843025862
Year 10. Sixth team. I’m a Jets fan, which means I watched this whole ridiculous tour start. Adams turned into a genuine problem for opposing offenses within a few seasons of getting drafted, and then Seattle gave up two first-round picks, a third-rounder, and Bradley McDougald to get him in 2020. My dad still brings that trade up unprompted, usually while yelling about something completely unrelated.
This isn’t even the first time somebody decided Adams should be a full-time linebacker instead of a safety who occasionally covers routes he has no business covering. Pete Carroll already ran that exact experiment in Vegas last year.
Carroll put him in the linebacker room, told him to get over it, and Adams played all 17 games and all 448 defensive snaps down there, the most games he’d suited up for since 2018. The numbers that came back were fine. Forty-five tackles, one sack, one forced fumble, nothing like the Pro Bowl menace who used to terrorize quarterbacks.
Solid. Quiet. Not the disaster some people feared, and not the menace anybody hoped for either.
That’s the actual baseline going into this. Vegas already answered whether Adams can hold up as a linebacker. He can. What Vegas never answered is what happens when that conversion lands inside a defense actually built for a guy like him instead of one that just needed bodies in the room.
It’s camp season too, which means half the news cycle is stuck on training camp position battles nobody will remember by Halloween, and the other half hasn’t stopped talking about the NFL’s holdout summer that’s swallowed complexes from Minnesota to Miami.
Adams doesn’t fit either bucket. He didn’t hold out for money. He didn’t lose a competition. He signed with a team that runs the strangest defense in football and immediately made more sense than half the guys actually sweating through camp.
Brian Flores’ defense allowed 19.2 points a game last season, second in the entire league, by sending six and seven rushers at quarterbacks who only have five blockers to work with, disguising coverages until the snap, and occasionally playing three safeties at once because normal positional logic bores the man. That’s a defense built for the exact hybrid, aggressive role Adams has been trying to become since he left the Jets.
None of this is a lock. Adams is 30 now, this looks like a one-year show-me deal, and if Harrison Smith decides to retire, Minnesota could slide Adams back to safety and undo the whole bit anyway. Carroll wanted aggression and toughness and got a dependable role player back. Flores is betting he gets the version that used to make quarterbacks nervous.
Sixth team, and somehow this is the first stop where the scheme found him instead of the other way around. Carroll got the floor. Flores is chasing the ceiling.
