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Thorne Iceroom at the NFL Combine with Matt Harmon of Yahoo Sports and Reception Perception.

How you doing?

Thor, what's going on, buddy? It's been a long week.

I've been here since Monday.

Oh, gosh. It'd be nice to be home. But it's been great to see everybody. This is such a good event. I've seen people like yourself, you know, obviously know for years and only see you every now and again. It's been great to do that. A ton of information gathering. It's such a fun week, man. I love being here.

So let me ask you this. I wanted to have you on because tomorrow, everyone, the favorite day of the combine quarterbacks, running backs, and your specialty wide receivers testing tomorrow. So that's why I wanted to have you on. But before we talk about specific prospects, I wanted one of my favorite things is reception, the thing that you do. I want you to lay it out for

folks. How did it get started? How did you think of it? What goes into it? And then what value

does it have to folks? Yeah, reception for those not familiar, it's the methodology that I came up with

back in 2013, 2014 was the first year I collected league-wide data. Essentially what I do is I go over an eight game sample for NFL players and for prospects.

I chart every single route that they run, where they line up, how often they're winning against press, man, zone coverage,

and it's fantastic catch rate, yard temperature catchability.

You're really trying to paint that full picture of what a receiver is.

And why I think it's important is this will actually fit really well into talking about the Vikings. Yeah, if you want to have this conversation. It's trying to isolate wide receiver performance from outside variables because it doesn't matter how good you are as a wide receiver. Like you need those outside variables to go right to get production. I mean, think about it. A wide receiver receiver is running 30 plus routes in a game sometimes and they're lucky to get 8 to 10 targets. So I wanted to try to find a way to quantify the performance of every other route in there in order to, again, try to isolate their play away from surrounding variables. And that's obviously the first thing, you know, people love from fantasy, like who's winning early, you know, before they're starting, telling you who's good before they're good type of thing. But now I think one thing I've become more and more obsessed with, thinking about, talking about, talking to players about it, just like how the receiver position has changed. I mean, 2014, it's a very different league than what we've got now, you know, 10 plus years later. Guys are playing multiple positions.

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