Levi Drake Rodriguez

“I hate my phone!” X says.

It does this annoying thing where it silences calls from unknown numbers, so even though he had it in his hand, he wasn’t looking at the screen when the call from the 952 area code came in.

X thought he was prepared. He’d even done a trial run earlier that day. His friends called to see if his volume was loud enough, and he changed his ringtone to the NFL draft theme that chimes whenever a pick is made.

During one of the test runs, his mom, Dorothy, brought out a blowhorn to try to get people to stop talking, but the noise barely made a dent in the buzz created by the 70 or so people at his draft party.

X’s parents live in a one-story, 980-square-foot home. There are two bedrooms and one bathroom, a kitchen, a living room and a narrow hallway leading to the backyard. It’s the home X and his older sister, Jirah, grew up in together, where they shared a bedroom with a divider down the middle.

It’s the home where his dad, Narciso, would lock X out until he’d burned off some of his limitless energy. He wasn’t allowed to come back inside until he finished building whatever project he’d started — a deer blind or a hammock or a wood carving. It’s the home where X would drink more from the hose than he would from the sink.

His parents like to say they are “sports poor” because they spent most of their money on their kids’ athletic endeavors instead of other things, like a bigger house. “You put aside for that,” Narciso said. “Because that’s what it takes.”

Despite its size, Dorothy says the home was always the hangout house for him and his friends, who constantly tested the limits of how many people could fit comfortably inside. “We always tell people it’s a little house but it’s full of love,” she said.

The house faced the ultimate test on draft weekend.

Fifteen people stayed over Friday night before X’s draft day. He borrowed air mattresses from friends, and Dorothy scrambled to find enough pillows and blankets. X shared his room with a mix of friends and cousins — Mitch, Aiden, Spencer, Cross, Seth, Jagger — and his girlfriend, Reese. It felt like having a sleepover with his best buds. They could barely stop laughing.

“Everybody was twitching and farting,” X said. “I was like a little kid again.”

The next day, X wasn’t loose at all. He’d never felt like this before in his life. He ate only 12 chicken wings all day, well under his eat-as-much-as-humanly-possible diet. “I had a friggin’ empty pit in my stomach,” he said. And when friends and family saw the look on his face, they knew this was a different X. “I was ready for war,” he said. “It was like a pregame feeling.”

On draft day, X’s family and friends packed the house and spilled out into the yard. Dorothy said she originally intended to keep the party small, “but family, they’re coming,” so she hired a food truck and her sister-in-law got a keg and everyone brought their own tumblers and BYOB’d.

During commercial breaks, X alternated between greeting new arrivals and reading Bible passages about staying patient, like Colossians 1:11: “… being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience.” The fourth and fifth rounds passed, but during the sixth round, “the tension just raised and raised and raised until it was almost gonna explode in the room,” said Mitch the Australian punter, X’s best friend.

X sat on the couch, Reese on the floor in front of him, Dorothy next to him wedged into the corner of the couch with Narciso, Jirah on his other side and Mitch at the far end. People were shoulder to shoulder, standing anywhere they could, some perched on chairs, others sitting on top of each other, more lined up in front of the TV on the hardwood floor.

“There was no possible way anyone else could fit inside the house,” Dorothy said.

At one point she felt like she was having heart palpitations, so she sat in front of the fan. It was all too much — too hot, too many people — so she escaped to her empty bedroom, said a quick prayer and then returned to the cramped living room. X patted her knee and told her to relax, “We’re good, Mom.”

In the sixth round, the team headed by his college head coach’s cousin — Lions coach Dan Campbell — picked a defensive tackle. Detroit was the gritty city he’d visited pre-draft.

You dirty dogs, X thought.

At the start of the seventh round, X’s parents started counting how many picks were left: 36, 35, 34 … There was a stretch of four picks where three belonged to teams he visited. His agent told him that if he was going to get drafted, it would likely be in that run.

Pick 229, Las Vegas Raiders … cornerback M.J. Devonshire

Pick 230, Minnesota Vikings … guard/center Michael Jurgens

Pick 231, New England Patriots … tight end Jaheim Bell

X received calls and texts throughout the day from different teams telling him they wanted him as a priority free agent if they weren’t able to draft him — a clear sign they wouldn’t be drafting him. But there was one team he hadn’t heard from all week. Their scouts had been in touch with X and his agent regularly, but they’d fallen mysteriously silent. Now they were on the clock again.

X looked down and saw the missed call from the 952 area code. With his Bible in his right hand, he dialed with his left. The phone rang and rang and rang.

“Levi Drake,” a voice on the other end said.

“Talk to me, talk to me,” Levi said. He scooted up to the very edge of the couch cushion and clutched Reese’s arm, nervously rocking back and forth.

“Hey, you’re going to be a Minnesota Viking, man,” said general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.

Levi leapt up and bellowed: “LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!” The people inside the house erupted in dancing, jumping and shouting. The living room looked and sounded like a nightclub.

“I thought my house was going to fall down,” Dorothy said.

As many readers correctly guessed in the comments section, Prospect X is Levi Drake Rodriguez, who played defensive tackle for two seasons at Texas A&M Commerce, a program that just finished its second season in Division I FCS. Before that, he played defensive end at Southwestern Assemblies of God University, an NAIA program in Waxahachie, Texas.

The Vikings used their last draft pick on Rodriguez, and they were “sweating it,” said senior VP of player personnel Ryan Grigson, because Las Vegas and New England picked just before them and Minnesota knew he’d visited there.

Grigson, the former Colts GM, was a sixth-round pick himself, and he adores Day 3 of the draft more than probably any other human. When asked about Rodriguez after the pick, he gave reporters an answer so long and so enthusiastic it took up nearly an entire page of the transcript. He told multiple anecdotes: how Rodriguez loved to get to the facility early, sometimes sleeping there the night before, to be “soaking wet” with sweat by the time his teammates were still wiping the crust out of their eyes; how he duct-taped his cleats together as a kid to keep playing.

“I was obviously pretty giddy afterward because, to me, (Rodriguez) is the root of what I feel like we’re trying to promote here on Day 3,” Grigson said Monday. “It’s really the scout’s day and they just need to come with conviction and evidence and sell the players that they love. The GM’s got to feel that to take them.”

The scout that came with conviction this time was Blaine Gramer, Minnesota’s southwest area scout. He covers a geographically massive and football-rich territory — Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi — and visits about 50 colleges each season to check in on prospects. Gramer scouted Dolphins nickel corner Kader Kohou when he went undrafted out of Commerce in 2022, but the school wasn’t on Gramer’s radar this season until he worked his way through some cold calls to Texas schools in October.

He asked Commerce’s coaching staff if they had any players. They said they thought they had one. Gramer was skeptical. “Everyone says that,” he said. “It’s a long shot.”

Still, he took a quick glance at the long shot’s tape. Rodriguez “flashed enough” that Gramer kicked him over to scouting associate Michelle Mankoff. She’d do a full evaluation and let him know if this Commerce DT was worth his time. “And she said, ‘Yeah, you gotta watch this guy,'” Gramer said.

Gramer has one more anecdote to share. On Levi’s visit to Minnesota, he saw someone enter the building with their own code. So he asked his host scout, Sabo: If he wound up a Viking, would he get his own code? “Is that how I get in?”

Yeah, Sabo said.

“So, if I have my own code, I can come here wherever I want?”

Yeah, Sabo said.

“Oh man,” Levi said. “I’m gonna be here all the time. I might even sleep here.”

Sounded familiar.