Some 4.6 and 4.7 players? Some of them were also hitting the same and in some cases even faster marks. Something very interesting also shook out of that data. Your 4.4 and 4.3 speed guys were hitting 20, 21 MPH in those last 20 yards and the world fell back into order.
Just like that, the miles per hour we keep hearing about totally made sense. You just take a player’s 40 time, subtract their 20 yard split, and then divide that number from the final 20 yards (or 60 feet if you’re using feet per second like I do). It’s generally considered true that players hit their top speed before they reach the 20 yard mark, so why can’t we just use the last 20 yards? Calculating it is pretty simple. I decided to see if we can find a better measurement of top speed, and it didn’t even take all that long. It’s that 4.24 isn’t a great measurement of top speed. We hear about players hitting top speeds of 20 and 21 MPH all the time, so if Chris Johnson’s 4.24, the fastest in combine history, was shy of that, how fast are these guys really? The answer, of course, is that they are not 4.24 guys. When I calculated Chris Johnson’s speed in MPH, I noticed it was 19.3 MPH. It was just a neat little way to show speed in a different way. In working through the data, I added in a little tweak to show how many miles per hour a player runs based on their 40. It makes sense on the surface, what with it being an actual measurement of speed over a long distance. Despite that, I never really questioned that the 40 was a good measurement of long speed. I’ve been building and improving my Relative Athletic Scores metric for years on the idea that relative athleticism has a much better correlation to player success than a single measure of speed. It has always been a good measure of a player’s long speed, though, right?
Sure, some have questioned if the 40 is the best measurement of a player’s athletic ability, Hey, we’ve even built entirely new metrics out of that idea.
#FASTEST 40 YARD DASH EVER PRO#
Whether it was the NFL combine or a pro day, we measure player speed in the 40-yard dash, one of the most recognizable individual drills in sports. We know they’re fast both because they fly across the field every play and because we have at least once measured their speed.
#FASTEST 40 YARD DASH EVER FULL#
It’s always been full of fast players like Chris Johnson, Calvin Johnson, and Patrick Peterson.
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