Catching Up

PLAYERS, TEAM	CATCHES	YARDS	AVG.	TDS
Cris Carter-Jake Reed, Vikings	519	7,228	13.9	62
Herman Moore-Johnnie Morton, Lions	512	6,636	13.0	51
Bert Emanuel-Terance Mathis, Falcons*	423	5,563	13.0	42
Carl Pickens-Darnay Scott, Bengals	415	5,560	13.4	49
Rob Moore-Frank Sanders, Cardinals	414	6,220	15.0	27
*Emanuel signed with the Bucs in the off-season

It must be their Nordic reserve or just Midwestern manners, but the Minnesota Vikings are too polite to smirk. They feel like smirking. They know they have a right to smirk. If Minnesota were any other team, it would have redesigned its logo to show a sniggering Scandinavian. "It's a little early for that," says one club official, all but covering his mouth with his hand. Maybe if the Vikings had played a regular-season game, he admits, he'd let you see him smile. But in the meantime, no smirks. Team policy.

Behind their placid mugs, though, lies an almost unseemly smugness. The Vikings know in their hearts, if they can't quite reveal it on their faces, that they secured the organization's future with a dirt-cheap 21st draft pick. Is it true that 19 teams—the Cincinnati Bengals had the 13th and 17th choices—lacked the nerve or the good sense to pull the trigger on Randy Moss , whose speed, range and hands make him the wide receiver for the next millennium?

The Vikings still hardly believe their luck. Throughout the preseason Moss has dazzled with his ability to go long, emerge from downfield confusion and, uncoiling his 6'4" frame, pluck a football from the atmosphere. He did it in Minnesota 's preseason win over the Carolina Pandiers on Aug. 22, running 51 yards downfield, coming back for the typical too-short pass—"We tend to under-throw him," says Brad Johnson , who, like the other Vikings quarterbacks, has struggled to recalibrate his arm to Moss's otherworldly speed—and then outjumping a defensive back who had position for an interception.

The catch, the kind of reception that reduces football to a one-on-one sport, got a lot of replay on sports shows and fanned the flames of hope in Minnesota , where even the coaches have had to rethink their clich�s to account for Moss's instincts around the football. Receivers coach Hubbard Alexander, who had sputtered "once in a lifetime" about Moss the week before, was blas� by the end of the game against Carolina. "I guess that's going to be a typical play," he said of Moss's big catch, "just the nature of the business these days."

Even a Pro Bowl wide receiver such as Cris Carter is impressed by Moss's potential for stardom. "My brother [Butch] played pro basketball," says Carter, "so I was around when guys like Magic and Bird were coming in. Do you understand that this kid could be Michael Jordan ? That we're on the ground floor of something huge?"

This is all pretty strong stuff for a rookie whose big games up to now have been against the likes of Ball State and Bowling Green . It's especially strong for a kid for whom most of the league apparently had no use. Anybody remember draft day, when NFL general managers and coaches were doing their best impression of Roberto Dur�n ? No Moss! No Moss! Moss, who had once been projected as high as three on the draft board, slid out of the big money, slid so far that a wide receiver from Utah named Kevin Dyson went ahead of him.

Everybody has high hopes at this time of year, and it's not unusual for a franchise to trumpet its new talent, to whom, after all, it has probably paid a seven-figure bonus to sign. This Moss momentum is something else, however. Even Moss, who has decided to adopt an air of weary indifference to deflect attention, has gotten caught up in it—a little. "Those 19 teams," he says of the franchises that passed on him and thus cost him as much as $1 million a year over the life of his four-year, $4.5 million contract (plus another $4 million in bonuses), "we'll play some of them."

All these other teams acknowledged in the days leading up to the draft the risk of not taking Moss. They were resigned to the possibility of seeing him in the end zone (where he ended up an NCAA -record-shattering 25 times last season at Marshall ); they're not idiots, and they can read a stopwatch as well as anyone in Minnesota . It's just that everyone but the Vikings also had this picture of Moss wearing a convict's orange jumpsuit. And these days having a miscreant on the team is more embarrassing to an organization than getting beat on the corners.

Moss was indeed flagged three times by age 20, the first two incidents costing him scholarships at Notre Dame and Florida State before he could play a big-time down. There was the stomping of a kid in high school; a positive test for marijuana that, because it broke the probation resulting from the first episode, landed him in jail for two months; and then, after his freshman year at Marshall , a charge of domestic battery against the mother of his two children. Taken individually, the incidents might not have been particularly disconcerting to NFL brass. The stomping, to which Moss pleaded guilty, may have been over a racial epithet; the drug use was stupidity; as for the battery (the charges were dropped), the woman's father said she and Moss were both at fault, and he repeatedly expressed his support for Moss.

But most people took the three incidents together, and they were alarmed. Then, when Moss canceled out of the NFL scouting combine in February—for dental surgery, he said—he raised eyebrows. "You create suspicions," New Orleans Saints coach Mike Ditka said at the time, adding that he'd lost interest in Moss.