Face-up with Adam Najem, there is never much forewarning. There is a rolling lull to his movement, like a Caribbean wave quietly lapping at a worn pier pylon. And then suddenly the wave is over the pier and everything is under water and you wonder where it came from?

Najem has been doing this for three-plus years at Akron. Every year he adds another floor to the house and populates more rooms with his technique, which is more South American than anything else you might catch in Ohio. He tilts the field like a foosball table, meticulously picking space and using defenders’ eagerness against them. There is something about Riquelme in it, about the old style of No. 10s who could specialize under the striker without needing the pace or the agility to run down defenders like a bull on parade.

Najem is the American asteroid falling on our notions of athleticism beating technique. You may out-run him, but out-thinking him with the ball at his feet is another matter entirely.

Najem’s backstory is complicated. He is a New York Red Bulls Homegrown, part of that incredible burst of young central midfielders that includes current pros Sean Davis and Alex Muyl in addition to Najem and Arun Basuljevic, who will run Georgetown’s midfield this year. Any of those four would be a point of pride for any MLS team in terms of HG signings. And the Red Bulls just turned them one after another out like so many Model T’s off the assembly line.

But despite being the best player in the Red Bulls’ unsigned pipeline, he returned for his senior year at pass-happy Akron with rumors swirling overhead that he had a (now mended) falling out with his parent franchise. Whatever the reality, Najem’s brief offseason search for a pro deal abroad came to nothing, and he returned this fall for his final year under highly regarded coach Jared Embick at Akron. After reaching the College Cup semis last year, one assumes Najem is happy to have one more crack at the college exit Jordan Morris so ceremoniously enjoyed after the 2015 season.

And you would not bet against it. There is no better college player in the country than Najem. If the path is clear to the Red Bulls after this season, there should be no question about it. Sign him.

There is precedent if the Red Bulls and Najem can’t work out a deal. Last year, the Whitecaps opted to not offer goalkeeper Callum Irving a Homegrown contract, which threw him into the general draft with the rest of the pool (he was not ultimately drafted and ended up with the Houston Dynamo’s USL affiliate). It’s hard to imagine that happening here, but if it did, there’s your No. 1 overall pick. No questions asked.

Akron’s 2016 season began last weekend with typical success. The Zips won both games, 1-0 wins over Georgetown and Seattle. And it was a moment in the latter match – the pivotal moment, really – that distilled all of Najem’s game into one neat package and presented it to the world as an offering.

This is how you cope with pressure, find space, maneuver around a marker and my goodness what a delivery.

Najem’s hallmarks are all here, all professionally translatable and packaged into a possessional incubator at Akron.

NFL scouts love SEC programs because they more closely replicate the hard-knock rigors of the pro game. The styles are similar and so the risks are fewer. There are a few college programs that routinely produce good professionals, and Akron is essentially the Alabama of men’s college soccer. The coaching and development apparatus are there in a way they simply are not in most other programs. The track record of pros at every level – Yedlin and Kitchen and Trapp and Nagbe and Mattocks and Abdul-Salaam and Bunbury and Zakuani – is not to be ignored. There are no coincidences here.

So we’ll see where it goes with Najem. He’s got essentially four more months until we find out which forked path he’s taken: Red Bulls, MLS draft or somewhere farther afield. In any case, we have one more season to enjoy one of the better midfielders college soccer has seen in quite some time.