The Walk-On Flexes NFL Speed
N.C. State wideout Thayer Thomas turned his once scrawny body into Sunday-ready with a data-driven training approach that he traces all the way back to (checks notes) the fifth grade. It’s the future, he says, for the next generation of athletes.
April 19, 2023
Thayer Thomas might be the poster boy of a modern athlete. No, he isn’t the biggest, strongest or fastest. And when you consider what he looked like when he arrived at N.C. State in 2017, the idea of a 150-pound walk-on receiver ever getting a whiff of the NFL had all the makings of a sports movie even more absurd than Air Bud.
But make no mistake about it, Thomas has that dawg in him.
N.C. State coach Dave Doeren recognized it within a year, putting Thomas on scholarship before he ever took a game snap—something the coach had done with only one other walk-on in his past: J.J. Watt at Wisconsin.
“Thayer is unique,” Doeren told The Fayetteville Observer last fall. “If you really dig into his story and what he has done to his body—he’s above the one-percentile line when it comes to his work ethic.”
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Thomas is now on the cusp of joining an NFL team as a six-foot, 195-pound slot receiver who transformed his body with an old-school mentality (rep by rep—his middle name is Rockne after all) and a modern approach to training (data point by data point).
“Thayer has used every form of a technology available to him to measure himself and use that information to get better,” says TJ Graham, the head of performance at BreakAway Data and a former N.C. State wideout who played six seasons in the NFL.
Graham, a speed coach in Raleigh who trains athletes from high school to the pros, has worked with Thomas on the field since 2021. And he’s worked with Thomas off the field to help him get the most out of his athlete data, which the wideout often had to retrieve himself from team computers during after-hours trips to an emptied-out facility.
“I went to a school that, for whatever reasons, didn’t like to give us our data,” Thomas says. “But athletes can benefit from their data because it opens your eyes to being mindful about your work ethic, and your craft, and your abilities.”
As for his ability to play at the next level?
“I’ve seen his data and his growth and his speed up close,” Graham says. “He’s hit 23.2 miles per hour. There’s no question that he belongs on an NFL field.”
Thomas finished his N.C. State career with the second most receiving touchdowns (24), second most receptions (215), and fifth most receiving yards (2,484) in school history. He wasn’t invited to the NFL combine, but he still managed to impress scouts this spring, making good on last-minute roster spots at the Hula Bowl in Orlando and the East-West Shrine Bowl in Las Vegas.
“I was a late invite to the Hula Bowl. I was a late invite to East-West,” he says. “I've always been an underdog. I've always rose to the occasion, so I have to keep doing it.”
After three months of intense training, including extended stays at XPE Sports in Florida, Thomas’s underdog narrative shifted in earnest at his pro day in March.
When he wasn’t showing off his exceptional hands while catching passes from former N.C. State and NFL quarterback Mike Glennon, Thomas logged a 37-inch vertical jump and a 10-foot broad jump; benched 225 pounds 15 times; ran the 40 in 4.48 seconds; and clocked 3.95 in the short shuttle and 6.89 in the three-cone drill.
“Nailed everything,” he told the media afterward. “I always knew I had it in me. It was coming out today and putting it on display.”
On display being key words. Thomas competed shirtless, showing off rippling muscles from head to toe with every explosive change of direction that took him a step closer to realizing his singular goal: being drafted for a second time.
Wait, a second time . . . what?!
In 2019, Thomas was taken in the 33rd round of the Major League Baseball amateur draft by the Boston Red Sox after playing just 14 games that season as an outfielder for the Wolfpack. Thomas, to be sure, has always been a gifted athlete, earning all-conference honors in baseball, football and basketball during his junior and senior seasons at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, N.C.
But there’s a vast difference between being gifted (all D1 athletes are in some way, even undersized walk-ons) and becoming an elite route runner who can go across the middle and create separation against NFL defenses. For Thomas, nothing was ever gifted in the process of transforming into such a receiver. He earned it through grueling work and a deep understanding—thanks to his data—of how well his body adapted.
“Data gives you an action plan and shows you which areas to focus on,” says Thomas, who once joked that he had barely started growing armpit hair when he first arrived at N.C. State and found himself in meetings alongside NFL-bound teammates who were already showing balding patterns. “Data gives you a sense of awareness about who you are and what you’re doing as an athlete.”
Putting analytics in the hands of athletes might sound like a newfangled idea, but Thomas has had a data-informed approach to his own development since the fifth grade. At the urging of his father, he’d forego pickup games at the local Y and instead work on his jump shot, charting every make and miss on a clipboard.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” Thomas says. “It’s made me who I am.”
Over his final three-plus years of college, all the data that Thomas tracked tells the story of elite habits (doing the right things) being refined into pro-caliber routines (doing the right things the right number of times). Every day was imbued with purpose. Every drill was measured, analyzed, and recorded to track progress.
Tuesdays, for example, were for refining route techniques and doing change-of-direction drills. Wednesdays were for one-on-one competitions. Thursdays were for building total body power in the weight room. His schedule came with a personal no-cancellation policy to ensure he consistently put his feet in the grass. Balance training. Depth-perception training. Catching 300 footballs a day from QBs and the JUGS machine. And recovery was far more than just finding a foam roller; it meant targeted deep tissue work up and down the kinematic chains. Massages. Steam rooms. Yoga. Hot and cold tubs. Meditation. Visualization. Do it all again tomorrow.
He uses a WHOOP band to track his sleep patterns and his strain after workouts. He uses Catapult and Titan GPS tracking devices to get insights on his top velocities, overall distance, sprinting distance, acceleration metrics and more. He uses the BreakAway Speed feature to spot-check his peak miles-per-hour inside the BreakAway app, which stores all of his college athlete data so it can be used alongside his NFL athlete data in the coming years.
“Data tells you how fast you move, how well you move, and how you can get faster,” Thomas says. “And the feedback gives you a good analysis of how well your body is ready to perform.”
Able to see his own trends and patterns in his performance data, Thomas used that information to optimize his process leading up to games at N.C. State. To be at his best, he kept his total running distance under roughly 6,000 yards during a week of practice.
“If I was hitting higher numbers than that, it meant I needed a few extra days to fully recover,” he says. “If you’re doing too much before a game, your body isn’t going to be able to fully perform on that day. For me to be primed on game day, I needed to know how much I was running during the week.”
It’s the kind of game-day mentality that turns Saturdays into Sundays for football players.
Whether Thomas hears his name called in the later rounds of the NFL draft or eventually joins a team as an undrafted free-agent, he knows he’s primed for the next level.
Not because he’s put in the clichéd hard work, but because he has the hard evidence—his athlete data—that proves he belongs.
“There’s no better way to showcase your abilities than to show people your data,” Thomas says. “Data doesn’t lie, it’s right there in fine print of who you are as an athlete.
“And the better data you have, the easier it is to sell yourself and sell your game and get people to believe in what you're doing. It’s going to continue being my mindset, because data is only going to keep becoming more important for the next generation of athletes.”