Husker19941995
Three-Star Recruit
40 times are way overrated...
If you really want to put things in perspective all of these fast 40 times that are reported year in and year out are bogus..
Ben Johnson happens to have the fastest 40 yard dash ever recorded and his time was 4.38...
How many do you believe that any of the fastest guys in the NFL or college who have been clocked at 4.1-4.3 could even come close to a anabolic Ben Johnson in the 20 yard dash, 40 yard dash or 100m dash?
Not me... lol
I saw this in a story a while back and it is pretty interesting..
The link is down but here is a portion of it.
The shortest distance that the IAAF, track and field's international governing body, recognizes for world-record purposes is an indoor 50 meters, or about 54 yards. It is 5.56 seconds and it was set by Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey in 1996. There is also a world record for 60 meters -- 6.39 seconds by American Maurice Greene in 1998.
But it is another Canadian, Ben Johnson, who is believed to have run 40 yards faster than any human in history. Johnson is best known for injecting copious amounts of steroids and winning the 100 meters at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul in 9.79 seconds, only to have his gold medal and world record stripped after failing a post-race drug test.
Timing officials have since broken down that famed race into 10-meter increments, and Johnson was so preposterously fast that he went through 50 meters in 5.52 seconds and 60 meters in 6.37 -- both under the current world records at those distances. He went through 40 yards that day in 4.38 seconds.
He was running in spikes . . . on a warm afternoon perfectly suited for sprinting . . . with a slight tailwind . . . with years of training from arguably track's top coach, Charlie Francis . . . with Carl Lewis and six others of the fastest men on the planet chasing him . . . with 69,000 people roaring at Seoul's Olympic Stadium . . . with hundreds of millions of people watching on TV . . . with the ultimate prize in sports, an Olympic gold medal, at stake.
And, as we learned later, with muscles built with the assistance of the anabolic steroid stanazolol.
Four-point-three-eight seconds.
Then again, maybe Ben Johnson isn't the fastest 40-yard man in the world.
Maybe half the NFL players and college players are faster than anabolic Ben.
It can be the most important few hours of a football player's career. It is the day NFL scouts come to campus to determine whether prospects have what it takes to play at the next level.
Players are measured to the quarter-inch. They're weighed to the half-pound. They do a vertical jump and a standing broad jump. They see how many times they can bench-press 225 pounds. They do a 20-yard shuttle drill and something called a three-cone drill. They are put through a short workout specific to their position.
But it is something else that commands everyone's attention, something else that interrupts the businesslike atmosphere of players shuffling from one station to the next. Something else that causes scouts and spectators to snap to attention.
The 40-yard dash.
It is the day's shortest event, and the most critical. No other statistic carries more influence for an NFL prospect, no single number has more impact on his draft fortunes. It's not called Pro Scouting Day or Pro Prospect Day or Pro Workout Day. The sign taped to the weight-room door at San Diego State on March 19 says: "Pro Timing Day."
Or as local football agent David Caravantes puts it: "There's football speed and there's 40 speed, and the scouts will all tell you they understand that and game film is the most important thing. But how many defensive backs who ran a 4.6 are left on the draft board ahead of guys who ran 4.3?
"I'll give you another example. There's this DB who was originally projected as a first-rounder. But he didn't run the 40 that fast -- something like 4.6 instead of in the 4.4s -- and now they're talking about him slipping to the second round. Well, he's looking at a minimum $4 million signing bonus if he goes in the first round and only about $1.6 million if he goes in the middle of the second round.
"You do the math."
The players are inside the SDSU weight room being measured and weighed. In the hallway outside are their agents, pacing. Nervously. Occasionally they'll walk outside, look up at the sky and stick out an upturned hand to feel the raindrops.
This is not good. The plan, according to the schedule on the weight-room door, has the players lifting and jumping inside and running the 40 outside on SDSU's synthetic-turf practice field. The course marked with cones has them running on a spongy, soggy, uneven turf into a chilly wind with a dark sky spitting rain.
That's not good for 40 times, and that's not good for business.
The players leave the weight room and begin to warm up in the wind and rain. The agents squirm even more. They huddle with players, and soon the players are marching back into the weight room, demanding that they run inside on a strip of rubberized track laid between the various lifting machines
The fastest of the players at SDSU's Pro Timing Day, which also includes a half-dozen prospects from small West Coast schools, is Aztecs safety Marviel Underwood. Players each run the 40 twice, and Underwood is clocked in a hand-timed 4.38 both times.
Other prospects run their 40s at the annual NFL Scouting Combine in February inside Indianapolis' RCA Dome, where this year Arkansas quarterback Matt Jones went 4.37. Jones is 6 feet 6, 242 pounds.
It's also where Jerome Mathis, a wide receiver from tiny Hampton College in Virginia, sent his stock soaring with a reported 4.32. Some scouts apparently caught him sub-4.30. Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcels told people his stopwatch showed 4.25.
Never mind that Mathis was running on the RCA Dome's notoriously slow artificial turf, or that he was running alone without the aid of fellow competitors pushing him. Or that his left hamstring was wrapped because of a slight muscle strain.
Ben who?
There are the legends about the 4.17 Deion Sanders ran in high tops when he was at Florida State, or the 4.15 by a cornerback from West Virginia, or the 4.0-something a high school kid ran down in Texas.
Hogwash, all of it.
Track coaches go to Pro Timing Days, and they see scouts starting their stopwatches with their thumb, which has a slower reaction time than the index finger. They see them crowding the finish line and anticipating -- guessing, basically -- when someone will cross it. They see running surfaces that weren't professionally measured or leveled. They see no starter's gun, no automatic timing device, no wind gauge.
Grizzled track coaches love to say that the "clock doesn't lie." Well, it does in football.
Say someone clocks a hand-timed 4.35 in an NFL workout.
The accepted standard to convert a hand-timed event to its automatically timed equivalent is to round up to the nearest tenth of a second -- in this case 4.4 -- and add .24 seconds. Now you're at 4.64.
Most football 40s don't go on a starter's pistol but on an athlete's motion. The average reaction time among elite sprinters (from the gun to the moment they exert pressure on the starting block's electronic pads) is about .15 seconds; for a football player with little track experience it probably would be closer to .2. Add that in, and you have 4.84.
Now say it's a breezy day and you're running with a tailwind. Say it's 10 mph. Accepted track tables say that would provide a .07-second advantage over 40 yards. Add it in, and your 4.35 is suddenly a 4.91.
There's no shame in running a 4.9-second 40, of course. World-class sprinters get a bad start or get a cold day, and they go through 40 yards in the high 4s, too.
If you really want to put things in perspective all of these fast 40 times that are reported year in and year out are bogus..
Ben Johnson happens to have the fastest 40 yard dash ever recorded and his time was 4.38...
How many do you believe that any of the fastest guys in the NFL or college who have been clocked at 4.1-4.3 could even come close to a anabolic Ben Johnson in the 20 yard dash, 40 yard dash or 100m dash?
Not me... lol
I saw this in a story a while back and it is pretty interesting..
The link is down but here is a portion of it.
The shortest distance that the IAAF, track and field's international governing body, recognizes for world-record purposes is an indoor 50 meters, or about 54 yards. It is 5.56 seconds and it was set by Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey in 1996. There is also a world record for 60 meters -- 6.39 seconds by American Maurice Greene in 1998.
But it is another Canadian, Ben Johnson, who is believed to have run 40 yards faster than any human in history. Johnson is best known for injecting copious amounts of steroids and winning the 100 meters at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul in 9.79 seconds, only to have his gold medal and world record stripped after failing a post-race drug test.
Timing officials have since broken down that famed race into 10-meter increments, and Johnson was so preposterously fast that he went through 50 meters in 5.52 seconds and 60 meters in 6.37 -- both under the current world records at those distances. He went through 40 yards that day in 4.38 seconds.
He was running in spikes . . . on a warm afternoon perfectly suited for sprinting . . . with a slight tailwind . . . with years of training from arguably track's top coach, Charlie Francis . . . with Carl Lewis and six others of the fastest men on the planet chasing him . . . with 69,000 people roaring at Seoul's Olympic Stadium . . . with hundreds of millions of people watching on TV . . . with the ultimate prize in sports, an Olympic gold medal, at stake.
And, as we learned later, with muscles built with the assistance of the anabolic steroid stanazolol.
Four-point-three-eight seconds.
Then again, maybe Ben Johnson isn't the fastest 40-yard man in the world.
Maybe half the NFL players and college players are faster than anabolic Ben.
It can be the most important few hours of a football player's career. It is the day NFL scouts come to campus to determine whether prospects have what it takes to play at the next level.
Players are measured to the quarter-inch. They're weighed to the half-pound. They do a vertical jump and a standing broad jump. They see how many times they can bench-press 225 pounds. They do a 20-yard shuttle drill and something called a three-cone drill. They are put through a short workout specific to their position.
But it is something else that commands everyone's attention, something else that interrupts the businesslike atmosphere of players shuffling from one station to the next. Something else that causes scouts and spectators to snap to attention.
The 40-yard dash.
It is the day's shortest event, and the most critical. No other statistic carries more influence for an NFL prospect, no single number has more impact on his draft fortunes. It's not called Pro Scouting Day or Pro Prospect Day or Pro Workout Day. The sign taped to the weight-room door at San Diego State on March 19 says: "Pro Timing Day."
Or as local football agent David Caravantes puts it: "There's football speed and there's 40 speed, and the scouts will all tell you they understand that and game film is the most important thing. But how many defensive backs who ran a 4.6 are left on the draft board ahead of guys who ran 4.3?
"I'll give you another example. There's this DB who was originally projected as a first-rounder. But he didn't run the 40 that fast -- something like 4.6 instead of in the 4.4s -- and now they're talking about him slipping to the second round. Well, he's looking at a minimum $4 million signing bonus if he goes in the first round and only about $1.6 million if he goes in the middle of the second round.
"You do the math."
The players are inside the SDSU weight room being measured and weighed. In the hallway outside are their agents, pacing. Nervously. Occasionally they'll walk outside, look up at the sky and stick out an upturned hand to feel the raindrops.
This is not good. The plan, according to the schedule on the weight-room door, has the players lifting and jumping inside and running the 40 outside on SDSU's synthetic-turf practice field. The course marked with cones has them running on a spongy, soggy, uneven turf into a chilly wind with a dark sky spitting rain.
That's not good for 40 times, and that's not good for business.
The players leave the weight room and begin to warm up in the wind and rain. The agents squirm even more. They huddle with players, and soon the players are marching back into the weight room, demanding that they run inside on a strip of rubberized track laid between the various lifting machines
The fastest of the players at SDSU's Pro Timing Day, which also includes a half-dozen prospects from small West Coast schools, is Aztecs safety Marviel Underwood. Players each run the 40 twice, and Underwood is clocked in a hand-timed 4.38 both times.
Other prospects run their 40s at the annual NFL Scouting Combine in February inside Indianapolis' RCA Dome, where this year Arkansas quarterback Matt Jones went 4.37. Jones is 6 feet 6, 242 pounds.
It's also where Jerome Mathis, a wide receiver from tiny Hampton College in Virginia, sent his stock soaring with a reported 4.32. Some scouts apparently caught him sub-4.30. Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcels told people his stopwatch showed 4.25.
Never mind that Mathis was running on the RCA Dome's notoriously slow artificial turf, or that he was running alone without the aid of fellow competitors pushing him. Or that his left hamstring was wrapped because of a slight muscle strain.
Ben who?
There are the legends about the 4.17 Deion Sanders ran in high tops when he was at Florida State, or the 4.15 by a cornerback from West Virginia, or the 4.0-something a high school kid ran down in Texas.
Hogwash, all of it.
Track coaches go to Pro Timing Days, and they see scouts starting their stopwatches with their thumb, which has a slower reaction time than the index finger. They see them crowding the finish line and anticipating -- guessing, basically -- when someone will cross it. They see running surfaces that weren't professionally measured or leveled. They see no starter's gun, no automatic timing device, no wind gauge.
Grizzled track coaches love to say that the "clock doesn't lie." Well, it does in football.
Say someone clocks a hand-timed 4.35 in an NFL workout.
The accepted standard to convert a hand-timed event to its automatically timed equivalent is to round up to the nearest tenth of a second -- in this case 4.4 -- and add .24 seconds. Now you're at 4.64.
Most football 40s don't go on a starter's pistol but on an athlete's motion. The average reaction time among elite sprinters (from the gun to the moment they exert pressure on the starting block's electronic pads) is about .15 seconds; for a football player with little track experience it probably would be closer to .2. Add that in, and you have 4.84.
Now say it's a breezy day and you're running with a tailwind. Say it's 10 mph. Accepted track tables say that would provide a .07-second advantage over 40 yards. Add it in, and your 4.35 is suddenly a 4.91.
There's no shame in running a 4.9-second 40, of course. World-class sprinters get a bad start or get a cold day, and they go through 40 yards in the high 4s, too.
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