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RB Speed (Split from MoC)

"The only way Clarett would have a chance to make it is if he was drafted after the 6th round. He won't try because since he was drafted so early Denver will have to give him millions. Then when he flops they will send him to Europe and continue to pay him millions."

Sloopy45 said:
Never said anything of this sort. I said that IN MY OPINION, its stupid to draft this kid this high and give him that money.
Sloopy45 said:
The only way Clarett would shape up was as a 5th, 6th, 7th Round Selection or as a Free Agent in mini-camp working to make the team. Its the only thing that would've forced him to mature, get his life straightened out, & abandon the sense of entitlement that led to his downfall.

And now? The Broncos enabled the kid the way a drug dealer would enable a crack addict. You gave the kid a (probable) million dollar deal over the life of the contract, and basically guaranteed him a roster spot. Lets face it: even if he doesn't make the team this season, no team is flat-out cutting a 3rd Round Draft Pick. They'll send him to NFL Europe, coddle him some more, and only intensify his sense of entitlement.

He could've been a steal if the teams allowed him to drop into the latter rounds & they'd get a very hungry player in mini-camp. And now? They got a kid with no motivation to excel whatsoever with a million bucks in his pocket. What a shame.
You never said anything of this sort?!?!? Its damn near a direct quote!!!

Lay off the drugs dude.
 
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gost8: "You never said anything of this sort?!?!? Its damn near a direct quote!!!"

Enough. Like I said, they're all my opinion. I have mine, you have yours. Go make out with your imaginary girlfriend & drop it.
 
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Sloopy45 said:
gost8: "You never said anything of this sort?!?!? Its damn near a direct quote!!!"

Enough. Like I said, they're all my opinion. I have mine, you have yours. Go make out with your imaginary girlfriend & drop it.
Intelligent reply, just like all the rest. When all else fails resort to name calling and talk about something else you have no clue about. I have been married for 5 years.
 
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Sloopy45 said:
"So you think Ginn is faster than Ben Johnson on steroids? Not only faster but over a tenth faster?"

Dude, its a different standard of measure. 40 times are NFL/college/HS football speak. Your mention of Ben Johnson is pointless. You can't compare a track star's times with what is measured at a football camp/combine. I don't give a shit (and don't know) what each individual's ACTUAL 40 times are. I know what's reported, and what I see.

And this is relevant to nothing in the conversation. Who cares about Ben Johnson? You're trying to discredit NFL 40 times. Ok, done. Next post, write me a paper on how the NBA lists players as taller than they actually are.
You are an absolute idiot. MoC will probably need almost this whole season to get back into true playing shape, but as Alan has said numerous times, between the white lines the kid can flat out play.
Also, since he's had 2 years off- he doesn't have near the mileage on him that the other backs in the draft have. He's grown up a lot- or the Broncos wouldn't have drafted him so high, and he's a proven winner. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if MoC has the best NFL career of any back in this year's draft.

Since you are so hung up on his speed, and you've seen every down he ever played at OSU, perhaps you could find the elusive clip of him being run down from behind....and before you babble about how that was then and this is now- remember that his combine time was run after training with a personal trainer (maybe more than one) for 2 years. His playing days he was training with the team and a world class S&C program- which he'll have again with the Broncos.
 
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Yeah I agree MoC is going to be on the Bronco's next year. I read an article over on the devnerbronco's home page, and it said he was working his tail off. Not only that but Shannahan was quoted in also mentioning incredible hands, and vision. Obviously they're not really worried about speed, and neither was tressel when they recruited him. He wasn't the fastest when he came here either but we knew how dangerous the kid was. I think the bottom line is we all know MoC is dangerous as anyone in the backfield but can he just get himself back into shape and do the work necessary to make himself into a pro bowl running back??
 
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gost8 said:
AS I HAVE SAID COUNTLESS TIMES. 40 times are over rated.

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. <dummy-1> </dummy-1> 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 is faster.
Track competition races are started from a pistol shot, which means that the timer starts before the runners start running. NFL combine 40-times start the timing when the runner starts, meaning that the timer does not start before the runner starts running. The two times cannot be directly compared, but a typical conversion is to subtract 0.25 seconds from a track meet time to get a football test time. This means that Ben Johnson would have run about a 4.13 second 40 at the combine. No one in the NFL is that fast.

edit: this difference has nothing to do with whether track meet times or NFL combine times are more accurate. They're both completely electronic and completely accurate, but because of the fundamentally different relationship between timer start and runner start in the two 40-types, track times are intrinsically longer for any given runner.
 
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zincfinger said:
This means that Ben Johnson would have run about a 4.13 second 40 at the combine. No one in the NFL is that fast.
Close...but here is a good article on this


Forty times are bogus in the NFL
April 17, 2001
BY CLARK JUDGE
FOXSports.com

There is something that makes no sense to me, and, for once, it doesn't
involve Mark Cuban. No, it's what I'm hearing about Michael Vick, the
first choice in this weekend's draft. The word starting to make the
rounds on the Virginia Tech quarterback is that he can run the 40 in
less than 4.3 seconds.

I never saw Vick run a 40, and I wasn't at his workout at Virginia Tech.
But one thing I can guarantee is this: Vick cannot run the 40 in under
4.3 seconds. Heck, he can't run it under 4.4, either.

That's not a knock on Vick. It's a knock on an NFL practice that is
absolutely, positively out of whack. I'm talking about 40-yard dash
times. They're the standard by which draft-eligible players are
measured, and they're as reliable as UFO sightings.

Yet when the NFL begins its march of draftees on Saturday you're going
to hear how one running back ran a 4.32, a wide receiver peeled off a
4.34 or some 350-pound lummox breezed through a 4.85. It makes for good copy. But so did Paul Bunyan.

"The only way to get a true 40-yard dash time is to get electronic
timing where a man breaks a wire when he leaves the starting gate," said
Buffalo's vice president in charge of player personnel, Dwight Adams.
"The 40 is a common denominator in football, but it's blown way out of
proportion. It's physically impossible to run a 4.2 and, probably, a
4.3."

Don't tell that to the guys holding stopwatches. I remember when Vance
Johnson, then a wide receiver at the University of Arizona, ran the 40
in 4.19 seconds. At least that's what I was told. I guess Denver was,
too, because the Broncos made him their second-round draft pick in 1985.

I also remember when Laveranues Coles, then a wide receiver at Florida
State, was supposed to have run a 4.16. Nobody said anything about it
being wind-aided, but it would have taken Hurricane Andrew to push him
to a finish like that. The Jets media guide has him clocked at 4.29 last
year, and there was no wind advisory there, either.

The NFL scouting combine has been using electronic timing since 1990,
but that's one year after Deion Sanders set the standard against which
all others are measured. Sanders ran a 4.29 in Prime Time, and nobody
has beaten the mark since.

"You've got to take into consideration that most of these times are done
with stopwatches," said San Diego State's Rahn Sheffield, coach of the
women's track and field squad and a former track star himself. "A 4.2
really translates to a 4.4. When you hand time (dashes) it opens up room
for human error. So when a Marshall Faulk runs a 4.33, it really equates
to a 4.5."

All of which comes as no news to Adams, who for years has laughed off
40-yard dashes and vertical jumps and long jumps as insignificant
measures of a football prospect's abilities. He's more interested in
production, which makes a lot of sense to me . and anyone else who
believes stopwatches weren't made for football.

Remember when Jerry Rice emerged from Mississippi Valley State in 1985?
He was supposed to be too slow. Same with USC running back Marcus Allen. Yeah, well, I never saw a defensive back who could catch Rice from
behind until he tore up his knee, and Allen's a lock for the Hall of
Fame.

O.J. Simpson might have been the fastest back to play the game. Go ahead and make a case for Bo Jackson. Maybe Herschel Walker, too. But Simpson
ran a leg on Southern Cal's 440-yard relay team, one that set a world
record, and if he were in this year's draft he'd be the fastest running
back by far; faster than Big-10 sprint champion Michael Bennett. Faster
than LaDainian Tomlinson. Faster than Deuce McAllister.

Any idea what Simpson ran for a 40? I do. Try 4.5. If you don't believe
him ask. He said it shortly after he left USC.

"I must've missed something here," said Adams. "I spent some time this
spring with an Olympic sprinter, and we sat in a stadium together,
watching guys work out and talking about how the 40-yard dash times were way overdone."

The sprinter was Dennis Mitchell. Yeah, THAT Dennis Mitchell. He and
Adams were together at the University of Florida, and when they heard
times of some of the guys they watched Mitchell said nothing. He just
shook his head.

"He was a little shocked," said Adams. "Being a great sprinter, he'd
never seen so many people running 4.1s and 4.2s. I've talked to (track
coach) Brooks Johnson and others who say, 'You football people are way
ahead of us.' Of course, they're facetious."

If Adams had his way, he'd rely more on times for shorter distances --
especially for offensive and defensive linemen. Make them stop running
40s and time them for 10s, maybe 20s. That's all they usually cover,
anyway.

"I could see it," said Cleveland's vice president in charge of football
operations, Dwight Clark. "But for running backs, wide receivers and
defensive backs, I'd like to see the 40 stay."

The Browns don't rely on others' times. They clock prospects themselves,
and if they don't, they don't have a record of them. The Browns never
timed anyone at 4.2. They never timed anyone at 4.3, either, though they
had the University of Arizona's Trung Canidate at 4.32 last year. I
wasn't at that workout, either, but I know something was wrong.

And here's why. The fastest starter I ever saw was sprinter Ben Johnson, and at the 1988 Seoul Olympics track and field's fastest starter ran the 100 meters in a blistering 9.79 seconds, a time that later was disallowed after Johnson tested positive for steroids. Know how fast he covered the first 40? It was 4.69 seconds. Forty meters is approximately 44 yards, which means Johnson ran the first 40 in 4.26.

So, now, let's see if I have this straight: The chemically enhanced
Johnson, the fastest starter in track history, ran the fastest 100 in
history . only it was one-tenth of a second slower than Laveranues Coles
a year ago and three one-hundreths of a second ahead of Sanders' NFL
combine record.

It makes you wonder. It makes you wonder why anyone believes this stuff.

"I look at guys like Mean Joe Greene and Steve Van Buren and wonder how
many 4.3s those guys did," said Adams. "I think we've gotten to the
point where we've overdone the clock workout."

Senior writer Clark Judge covers the NFL for FOXSports.com. Send your
comments to [email protected].
 
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osugrad21 said:
Close...but here is a good article on this
I'm not sure what part of what I said you were disagreeing with, but what I said is correct (although I was going with someone else's stated track 40-time for Ben Johnson). The fact remains that you subtract approximately 0.20 - 0.25 seconds (depends on the runner) off a track meet time to get the corresponding NFL combine time. If Ben Johnson's track meet 40 time is 4.26, as this article says, then his NFL combine time would be roughly 4.01 to 4.06. Maybe take a little less off of his time since what you're taking off is the start time (the time required to react to the pistol shot), and his start time was presumably extremely good.

This article actually did not address in any way the difference between track meet times and NFL combine times. And note that official combine times do not use hand-held stop watches. Any unofficial times, or football times from other sources, cannot be vouched for, as this article correctly alludes to.
 
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zincfinger said:
I'm not sure what part of what I said you were disagreeing with, but what I said is correct (although I was going with someone else's stated track 40-time for Ben Johnson).
Actually, I wasn't disagreeing. I do hold that you are too high in your reaction assessment however. .20-.25 seems high. A few weeks ago, as I told Alan who can verify, we had a sophomore football player/track runner hit 10.57 in the 100...got nosed out at the line by NCSU signee JC Neal. However, for the state meet, .15 had to be added to the time to negotiate the hand clocking.

Small details, but essentially we are on the same side of this argument.
 
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osugrad21 said:
Actually, I wasn't disagreeing. I do hold that you are too high in your reaction assessment however. .20-.25 seems high. A few weeks ago, as I told Alan who can verify, we had a sophomore football player/track runner hit 10.57 in the 100...got nosed out at the line by NCSU signee JC Neal. However, for the state meet, .15 had to be added to the time to negotiate the hand clocking.

Small details, but essentially we are on the same side of this argument.
Grad21, either I don't understand what you're saying, or else we're talking about completely different things . I won't comment on any particular H.S. track meet, but in Olympic track meets (or any world-class caliber track meet), there is no hand timing whatsoever. Likewise, in official NFL combine 40-yard dash measurements, there is no hand timing whatsoever. The difference between Olympic and (official) Combine times results from the fact that the Olympic race starts with a pistol shot, and the Combine measurement starts when the runner lifts his fingertips off a pressure-sensitive pad in the ground. The 0.20 - 0.25 seconds is a general estimate, and it varies from runner to runner, but it corresponds to that brief pause between when the pistol is fired and the runners start to run. There is no such brief pause at the start of an officially timed combine run because it doesn't start from a pistol shot.
 
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zincfinger said:
The 0.20 - 0.25 seconds is a general estimate, and it varies from runner to runner, but it is corresponds to that brief pause between when the pistol is fired and the runners start to run.
I realize what you are talking about, but I disagree with this estimate. My example was, although probably poorly explained, was just a version of the discrepancy justification of human reaction. I know what you are saying, but I see your estimate as too high.

I could be wrong as I don't profess to be a track man, but we deal with these 40's a good bit at the combines. Another factor is also the twitch of a runner before takeoff...especially at the highschool level. Since the watch starts at first movement, this also affects the time.
 
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osugrad21 said:
I know what you are saying, but I see your estimate as too high.
Well you could be right on that, that's just a common range that I've seen estimated for reaction/start times. And obviously the better the track starter (and I'd assume that in his steroid-induced world record time, Ben Johnson had a pretty quick start), the lower that number would be.
 
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Another pretty comprehensive article on this (quote below is from this article).


Mark Zeigler said:
[font=&quot]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.[/font]
Looks like I was just a bit on the high side with my estimate on this, and grad nailed me to the wall. Anyway, synopsis on this story - and I know most of you are fully aware of this - football 40 times are generally not very realistic.
 
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