40-yard dash History

[osugrad21]

Link

The mystique of the 40-yard dash

[SIZE=+1]Since Paul Brown's days, fleet feet have been a sure way to get on NFL's fast track
[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]01:19 AM CDT on Sunday, March 18, 2007

[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]By TODD ARCHER / The Dallas Morning News
[email protected][/SIZE] By the time you finish reading this sentence, Arkansas cornerback Chris Houston would have finished running 40 yards.
Houston may have run himself into the first round of next month's NFL draft.
At the NFL scouting combine, Houston ran a 4.32-second 40-yard dash, making him one of the fastest defensive backs. Mix in how he performed against top receivers, such as Southern California's Dwayne Jarrett, Tennessee's Robert Meachem and South Carolina's Sydney Rice, and Houston is projected as a first-rounder.
"I've been the fastest in elementary school," Houston said. "Middle school, I was the fastest. High school, I was the fastest. I went out there in 11th grade in clothes, and I saw everybody running, and my coach didn't want me to run because I think I twisted my ankle. But I still ran with clothes on and still ran a 4.34."

Cont'd...

 

[utgrad73]

NFL 40 Times Controversy

http://www.olympic-usa.org/11611_32384.htm

There is no official world record for 40 yards.

Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson ran a 9.79 sec 100 meter in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. His gold medal and world record was stripped after failing a post-race drug test. 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 . . .

This article states that most NFL 40 times are inaccurate due to hand timing. 4.35 forties are not what they seem...

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.

Then again, maybe Ben Johnson isn't the fastest 40-yard man in the world.
Maybe half the NFL is faster.

I've been struggling with this article and the only conclusion is that Olympic times are more accurate since they are electronically timed. NFL 40 times are hand timed and therefore less accurate but we accept the standard as if it where gospel. I'd like to see Ted Ginn lined up with Carl Lewis and Deon Sanders (as kind of a "fantasy" sprint in their primes). Then time them all electroncally running a 40. What would the result be?

 

[Pheasant]

http://www.olympic-usa.org/11611_32384.htm

There is no official world record for 40 yards.

Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson ran a 9.79 sec 100 meter in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. His gold medal and world record was stripped after failing a post-race drug test. 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 . . .

This article states that most NFL 40 times are inaccurate due to hand timing. 4.35 forties are not what they seem...





I've been struggling with this article and the only conclusion is that Olympic times are more accurate since they are electronically timed. NFL 40 times are hand timed and therefore less accurate but we accept the standard as if it where gospel. I'd like to see Ted Ginn lined up with Carl Lewis and Deon Sanders (as kind of a "fantasy" sprint in their primes). Then time them all electroncally running a 40. What would the result be?

I hate the Ben Johnson argument....running a 100 meters and running a 40 are two completely different things. If Ben Johnson had been trying to set the world record in the 40 he would have run a 4.15. As it were, he was trying to run the fastest 100 meters, which is completely different.
Also, doesn't the NFL now use FAT at the combine?

 

[utgrad73]

I hate the Ben Johnson argument....running a 100 meters and running a 40 are two completely different things. If Ben Johnson had been trying to set the world record in the 40 he would have run a 4.15. As it were, he was trying to run the fastest 100 meters, which is completely different.
Also, doesn't the NFL now use FAT at the combine?

Ben was running with copious amounts of illicit drugs in his body. He cheated but that's another topic. The NFL 40's is a measure of relative speed among football players and should not compare Olympic sprinters. Ben Johnson couldn't catch a football, dodge a half dozen defenders, and run 100 yards in 9 plus seconds for a TD. But there could be a few football players that could run with Ben. Would anyone like to speculate on who that might be? What was TG II 100 meter time? Didn't he run high hurdles in HS? What did Deon Sanders run the 100 in?

 

[Pheasant]

Ben was running with copious amounts of illicit drugs in his body. He cheated but that's another topic. The NFL 40's is a measure of relative speed among football players and should not compare Olympic sprinters. Ben Johnson couldn't catch a football, dodge a half dozen defenders, and run 100 yards in 9 plus seconds for a TD. But there could be a few football players that could run with Ben. Would anyone like to speculate on who that might be? What was TG II 100 meter time? Didn't he run high hurdles in HS? What did Deon Sanders run the 100 in?

Teddy didn't really run the hundred. I've heard 10.5, but that was hand timed. I've never heard of Deion running the 100, so I don't know. There are football players who could run 100 with the world's elite sprinters if they trained for it, but they don't. It's like taking a car you're going to tune for 0-60 against the same kind car you're going to tune for 0-100. They can't necessarily compete with each other just because they're both fast. One is designed to get to point A as fast as possible, while the other is designed to get to point B as fast as possible while happening to go through point A on the way.

I would put Rod Woodson, Deion Sanders, Bo Jackson or Darrell Green (in their prime) against any world class 100 meter runner in a 40 yard dash. They're completely different animals (the events, not the people) that the track athletes never train for.

In other words:

Great post, I agree

 

[bkochmc]

Why not split the difference between 100m and 40yd and go with the 60m dash a la indoor track. To win those races you have to have an amazing start and just enough sprinting stamina.

Of course, this was the same argument that spawned the Michael Johnson/Donovan Bailey 150m race, a race half way between each runner's specialty to see who would win... Johnson "pulled his quad" at the 100m mark. Coincidently Bailey was ahead of him when that occurred.

 

[jpeezy11]

Why not split the difference between 100m and 40yd and go with the 60m dash a la indoor track. To win those races you have to have an amazing start and just enough sprinting stamina.

Of course, this was the same argument that spawned the Michael Johnson/Donovan Bailey 150m race, a race half way between each runner's specialty to see who would win... Johnson "pulled his quad" at the 100m mark. Coincidently Bailey was ahead of him when that occurred.

ne1 remember ray carruth they said when he was at colorado he ran a 4 flat in the 40

 

[MililaniBuckeye]

ne1 remember ray carruth they said when he was at colorado he ran a 4 flat in the 40

OK, now translate that into something resembling English...

 

[BB73]

ne1..

ne1...

Bueller?

 

[Bleed S & G]

OK, now translate that into something resembling English...

lol sound it out.. thats my general rule of thumb.. it's like reading liscense plates

 

[MililaniBuckeye]

AIM is baaaad, umkay?