The NFL missed on Stefon Diggs, and it gave the Vikings a playoff hero

Stefon Diggs is now the author of one of the greatest finishing plays in football history. The 61-yard touchdown he caught at the buzzer from Case Keenum on Sunday flipped the Vikings from certain defeat to an NFC Championship Game berth, 60 minutes from becoming the first team to host a Super Bowl in the event’s 52-year history.

It was also the first walk-off touchdown catch in a playoff game before overtime, ever.

Diggs didn’t do anything revolutionary on the game-winning play. He made a fine catch near the sideline. It would’ve been for nothing if Saints safety Marcus Williams hadn’t committed the most inexplicable late-game coverage error since Rahim Moore against the Ravens six years earlier. But it was still the third-year receiver’s sixth catch of the day — even if Williams hadn’t whiffed, Diggs would’ve had about 100 yards on 10 targets against the league’s No. 7 pass efficiency defense.

Diggs has evolved into a star. It wasn’t just Sunday, either.

Since the Vikings picked Diggs out of Maryland in the fifth round of the 2015 draft, 146th overall, he’s somewhat quietly been one of the most productive receivers in the world. During Diggs’ three years in the league, just 32 players have been targeted more than 200 times and averaged more than eight yards on those plays. Diggs is 21st among them in yards per target (8.5) and fourth in catch rate (68.7 percent). Despite the Vikings’ revolving door of quarterbacks in the past three years, Diggs has become a clear-cut No. 1 receiver in the infancy of his career.

Diggs didn’t come out of nowhere. He was a league-wide scouting miss, for a few reasons.

(This is as good a time as any for a disclosure: I went to Maryland with Diggs, in the class of 2016, and covered him for a couple of years. Most college football people root a little harder for people they followed back when, and I’m surely no different.)

It’s been known for years that Diggs has preternatural talent. When he was a college recruit in the class of 2012, he was the No. 8-overall prospect in the country and No. 2 receiver behind Dorial Green-Beckham (LOL, in retrospect), according to the 247Sports Composite. He went to nearby Good Counsel High School and, fortunately for the Terps, agreed to play for them instead of taking an offer from Ohio State, Florida, or anyone else. He was arguably Maryland’s most important signee ever.

Diggs produced at Maryland. He had just over 2,200 yards in 28 college games, including three at the end of his freshman season where Maryland started a freshman linebacker at quarterback, its depth chart decimated by injuries to all of the true QBs on the roster. Diggs managed 16 catches for 182 yards in those three games.

Diggs was electric from the day he set foot on campus. He had two kickoff returns for touchdowns as a freshman, and the school distributed “CAN YOU D1GG IT?” T-shirts.

He was limited to 17 games in his sophomore and junior seasons, the product of a broken leg, a lacerated kidney, and a one-game suspension for a pregame scuffle before a showdown at Penn State. All the while, he had the displeasure of playing in an offense that a) didn’t much prioritize getting him the ball, and b) had some of the worst quarterback play anywhere in the Power 5 conferences.

He came off that kidney injury to catch 10 balls for 138 yards in his last college game, a 24-point loss to Stanford in the 2014 Foster Farms Bowl. Diggs’ teammates had five catches for 68 yards that night, in a fitting way for his college stint to end.

But Diggs’ career numbers weren’t huge. That was because he’d been hurt a couple of times — once on a freak leg injury, once when an internal organ got hit. And it was because he played for Maryland, a team that was never good enough to deserve him. Diggs also faced “off-field concern” whispers that were never substantiated.

Diggs was the 19th receiver taken in 2015. That’s not the fault of the players drafted ahead of him, every one of whom Diggs has outplayed over three seasons. (Amari Cooper has more yardage, but he hasn’t been nearly as efficient as Diggs.)

The Maryland product never stopped having five-star talent, but circumstance relegated him to the draft’s lower reaches. You can find great receivers late in the draft, and there’s no shame in teams missing on great players. Diggs is one of the closer receivers in the league by playing style and production to Antonio Brown, who went 195th overall to the Steelers in 2010. But usually, when players wait around for days at the draft, they’re not consensus five-star recruits who were good in college.

Diggs was always going to be good, because he always had incredible hands, breakneck speed, and impressive route-running ability. His college receivers coach was two-time Pro Bowler Keenan McCardell, who vouched for him to NFL teams. His combine and pro day numbers were solid, though he didn’t set the world on fire. He was a super recruit who played like one for three years despite a brutal environment.

It’s extra silly that Washington and Baltimore — the two teams within a few interstate miles of Diggs’ alma mater — didn’t catch onto the notion that he was a lot better than the rest of the league realized. But everyone else underrated him, too.

Every team has needs, and some elite players are always going to fall through cracks into the later rounds. But Diggs was on every scout’s radar for years — as a national recruit, then as a No. 1 receiver in the ACC and Big Ten — and whatever shortcomings he had at Maryland were the fault of people not named Stefon Diggs.

He was as close to a sure thing as any receiver in his class. That nobody jumped to take him sooner is a key reason the Vikings are 60 minutes from the Super Bowl.