What the hell are you doing? classmates would ask him.

I’m getting stronger, man, Thomas would tell them.

And Thomas knew he needed to get stronger. As a junior wide receiver in Southern California, Thomas barely had seen the football field for Taft. A growth spurt shot him to 6 feet 3 inches, but his body had not caught up. He weighed just 160 pounds; his lankiness prevented speed; and he crumbled when cornerbacks pressed him. When he told teammates he would play in the NFL like his uncle, Keyshawn Johnson, they laughed at him.

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“There’s kids that would cripple under it,” said Matt Kerstetter, Thomas’s coach at Taft. “They’d be crushed by it. Kids making fun of you — that would wear some people out. It seems like Mikey is just wired differently: ‘I’m going to prove all you wrong.’ He never, ever said that. Those words never came out of his mouth. It just seemed to be the way he would internalize it.”

The laughing at Michael Thomas stopped long ago, but he plays like he still hears it. Thomas has turned doubts into fuel for his immense capacity for work, and the work has made the third-year wide receiver among the best in the NFL. On Sunday, Thomas will be one of the best players in the Superdome when he and the New Orleans Saints face the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC championship game.

In the first meeting between the Saints and Rams, Thomas caught 12 passes for 211 yards, burning cornerback Marcus Peters to the point that it sparked a verbal feud between Peters and Coach Sean Payton, who gloated about how much he liked the matchup. It may have been Thomas’s best game, but it was not an aberration. In the Saints’ 20-14 victory over the Eagles last week, Thomas caught 12 passes for 171 yards, scoring one touchdown and serving, crucially, as a decoy on another.

Thomas led the league in receptions this year, but even that honorific sells the accomplishment short. He caught 125 of the 147 passes thrown to him, and the resulting 85-percent catch rate is the highest by a wide receiver in a single season since the NFL started tracking targets in 1992.

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“A lot of people underestimate Mike,” Saints running back Alvin Kamara said. “You might look at him, and you might not see a Julio Jones or an Odell [Beckham] or some of those guys. He kind of has an unorthodox style about him. If you really watch him, and if you really know football, the stuff he does is amazing. The way he gets open, the way he catches the ball, the way he separates, the way he runs his routes, he has a knack. I think he’s the best receiver right now.”

Thomas’s absurd catch rate owes first to his hands, strengthened by years of squeezing. He still carries grippers, but he has graduated to a different kind, a V-shaped silver bar with tension ratcheted high. Fellow Saints wide receiver Austin Carr also carries one.

“His is much harder to grip than Austin Carr’s,” rookie wideout Tre’Quan Smith said. “I did it a couple times. I was like, ‘Damn, Mike. This is kind of hard.’ ”

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Saints cornerback Eli Apple, who played with and practiced against Thomas at Ohio State, called Thomas “quarterback-friendly.” It means Thomas aggressively extends to catch passes, comes back to the ball when finishing his routes and, because of those hands, creates a giant radius to which Drew Brees can throw passes.

“He’s not someone who needs his body to catch the football,” Payton said. “He can catch it correctly, thumbs together, extended.”

“He has every tool that you could have as a wideout,” veteran Saints wide receiver Ted Ginn said. “He could be crafty with you. He could big-boy, strong-arm you, finesse you. He’s got it all in his game. It just depends what route it is. As far as that, the guy’s a man-child.”

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Payton used to have a Thursday ritual. During those practices, he would line up across from wide receivers such as Lance Moore and Marques Colston and simulate the kind of bump-and-run coverage they would receive on third downs. Then along came Thomas. He performed the drill as usual, and Thomas’s burst off the line left Payton with one finger bent sideways and a bruised chest.

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“I felt like I was in an automobile accident,” Payton said. “That was the last time.”

The quality teammates most admire is what Ginn called “his eagerness to be great.” Since Thomas arrived in New Orleans, teammates have marveled at his quiet, relentless diligence. As part of their Saturday walk-through, the Saints practice recovering onside kicks. At the protestation of teammates, who worry about injuries during listless calisthenics, Thomas dives for balls at full speed.

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“A walk-through is not a walk-through to him,” offensive tackle Terron Armstead said. “That really is the one thing that separates him from everybody else. He’s not the fastest. He’s not the tallest. He’s not the strongest. He’s not the quickest. He just outworks everybody on the daily.”

“He’s always in game mode,” Smith said. “He’s never about jokes. Even in walk-throughs, he’s not walking through. I get in trouble for walking through, because he’s running. He makes everybody else run.”

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The tenacity traces back to his time at Taft, when he saw himself as an NFL prospect and no one else did. When Thomas barely played as a junior, he made it his mission to gain weight and strength. His father designed drills to improve his speed and gave him the grippers. Different colors corresponded to different levels of tension. He started at green, then moved to yellow, then blue.

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By the fall, Thomas was 180 pounds, and he had transformed. He not only became a starter, but a force. He led the state in receiving yards and caught 22 touchdowns in 13 games. He was named to one high school all-American team, but colleges still overlooked him, having already decided which receivers deserved their interest. Johnson tried to convince his alma mater to offer him a scholarship, but even USC wouldn’t listen to one of its all-time greats.

“To see who he is now, you would think he was a blue-chip who had his pick of the litter,” Kerstetter said. “And he didn’t. He definitely did not. UCLA and USC wouldn’t offer him. Washington wanted to grayshirt him. We kept saying, ‘What the heck are these people not seeing that we’re seeing?’ Notre Dame would not pull the trigger.”

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Thomas could have played at Oregon State or Colorado or a handful of other schools, but he saw himself as a big-time player, and he was willing to wait. He played one season at Fork Union Military Academy, and his year opened up an offer from Ohio State.

Thomas became Ohio State’s best wide receiver, but he never gained 800 yards or caught 60 passes in a season. Thomas ran the 40-yard dash in 4.57 seconds at the NFL combine, a pedestrian time that made teams overlook him. When the Saints evaluated Thomas, his strength struck Payton. When Thomas broke tackles and sprinted away from defenders after catches, Payton detected a potential star.

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“He was the guy we felt was the best receiver in that draft,” Payton said. “And I think it turns out we were right.”

The Saints took Thomas 47th overall in the 2016 draft, after five other wideouts had been picked: Corey Coleman (Browns), Will Fuller (Texans), Josh Doctson (Redskins), Laquon Treadwell (Vikings) and Sterling Shepard (Giants). Thomas processed the selection as more doubt, those teams who passed him added to a list of college recruiters and skeptical high school teammates. In February on social media, he noted that he had “lapped” those receivers taken before him.

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“I know that set a fire in him,” Kerstetter said. “A lot of people didn’t believe in him. But the people that did believe in him, that started with himself.”

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He plays now with the same determination derived from those perceived slights. Football, Kamara said, is a mental game, and Thomas has convinced himself nobody can stop him from catching a football.

“You see a competitor that deep and down inside, knows he’s not going to let nobody beat him,” Smith said. “He knows he’s not going to let the man in front of him beat him. That’s what I see in Mike.”

After the Saints drafted Thomas, Kerstetter visited him at rookie camp. The Saints permitted him inside the locker room, and as he spoke with his former wide receiver, Kerstetter thought back to his transformation at Taft.

“Mike,” Kerstetter asked, “you still got the grippers?”

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Thomas smiled and turned around. The kid who was once too skinny to play pulled from his locker a giant, V-shaped iron bar.

“Yeah,” Thomas said, still grinning. “I need something stronger now.”