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The Vikings tried everything to tap into the potential they saw in wide receiver Troy Williamson.

When you draft a guy seventh overall in 2005, that’s what you do.

But after watching him struggle to catch the ball, the Vikings decided he had depth-perception problems, and he had special exercises prescribed to try to fix it.

“That didn’t have anything to do with it,” Williamson said, via Michael Rand of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “I had every physical attribute to be an elite or even a good receiver in the NFL. I always go back to my mental game, as far as reading too much into things people were saying in the papers. When I was in college or high school I never read the papers, I never looked at what anyone said. That took a big mental toll on me. I’d say that was the biggest thing. Any player I talk to now that’s going.

“Any player I talk to now that’s going into the NFL, I tell them football of course is physical but it’s more mental than anything. When I look now at prospects who don’t pan out, I go back to my own situation as far as having all the tools but not having it there mentally when it came down to it.”

Of course, the dastardly newspapers might not have been the reason (he caught just 79 passes in three seasons for the Vikings), who traded him to Jacksonville for a sixth-round pick. Williamson was out of the league by 2010, but he was definitely glad to be out from under former Vikings coach Brad Childress, who once withheld a game check when Williamson went to South Carolina when his grandmother died.

“For me, it was about not understanding the importance of family and some of the things I had going on back home,” Williamson said. “And I never really got a true apology for that. He went back and gave me the game check back — which I donated to charity to show it wasn’t even about the money — but that was because the veterans like Antoine Winfield and Bryant McKinnie went back at it. They know the importance of family and other things bigger than football.

“So that was the time that I lost all respect [for Childress]. After that, it was tough playing for him, and I was kind of glad I got to leave Minnesota and get out from under him.”

He’s probably not the only one to share that sentiment, but hearing it out loud also underscores the business realities many players encounter, when they realize just playing the game well is no longer enough.