EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- The first seed of Rick Spielman's bold draft strategy was planted on April 26, 2012, when the Minnesota Vikings general manager sent the team's second- and fourth-round picks to the Baltimore Ravens so the Vikings could trade back into the first round and snatch a safety from Notre Dame with the 29th overall pick.

Spielman acquired the same pick in the 2013 draft to take Cordarrelle Patterson, and he got the 32nd pick to select Teddy Bridgewater in 2014. But it was the move to get Harrison Smith in 2012 -- in Spielman's first draft as the GM -- that signaled how the Vikings would try to rebuild a franchise whose walls had eroded with age. Smith never forgot it, either.

"At the time, that might have been a bit of a reach, what people thought," Smith said. "I always used that. I always wanted to make him right. I'll use this the same way going forward."

"This," of course, is Smith's new five-year, $51.25 million contract extension with the Vikings, which makes him the highest-paid safety in the NFL. The deal, which was finalized early Monday morning and signed by Smith on Monday, came together less than four months after Spielman said a deal for the fifth-year safety would be "coming down the pike pretty soon."

Smith's versatility and intellect have helped grow his stock with astute observers of the game, but he's not nearly as well-known as Seahawks safety Earl Thomas, whose deal Smith's contract surpassed on Monday. Like Thomas, Smith is represented by Athletes First; Andrew Kessler did much of the work on Thomas' four-year, $40 million deal, and was involved in the agency-wide preparation for Smith's negotiations, during which the firm told the Vikings it would only do a contract that made Smith the highest-paid safety in the league.

"That's a strong statement to make," Smith's agent, Brian Murphy, said. "It's not necessarily saying that Harrison is better than Earl -- I'm certainly not in a position to say that. It just has to be more than $10 million a year, or it's not worth giving up the other opportunities [to become a free agent]."

The onus will be on Smith to prove again that he's worth the money, though, and he seems to know as much.

"You always want to be recognized as one of the top guys at your position," Smith said. "I think if you're a competitor, you always see yourself like that. There's a lot of mutual respect between myself and the organization, and I think that just reflects it."