quote:
The truth is very simple. High School times are wrong.

The Truth About Speed, NFL Combines and the 40 Yard Dash!

Speed is the stuff of urban legend. Deion Sanders supposedly showed up at the NFL Combine, ran a 4.2 and went home. We routinely hear of high school kids who purportedly run 4.3's and 4.4's.

The stories of "reported" speed have gotten out of control. This would not be a problem in and of itself. Most of us could look at it and say "so what" people lie or people embellish. The real problem is that the lies seem to be setting the standard. One of the reasons that I no longer train athletes for the NFL Combine is the unrealistic expectations of athletes and agents based on these "urban legends".

Here's another angle on the whole "speed" thing. Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis ran split times of 4.67 for 40 meters.

The split times are below.

1.84 10 yd
2.86 20 (1.02 split)
3.8 30 (.94 split)
4.67 40 (.87 split)

40 meters is 43.74 yards. This would make the distance approximately ten percent further. This means we could reduce the time by approximately .36 seconds to account for the additional 3.7 yards. This would mean that in constant acceleration mode the best sprinters in the history of the world, using blocks, ran 4.31 for 40 yards. Does it seem plausible that high school football players can run faster times without blocks? No, it's impossible.

While I agree that a lot of the hand clock times from high school and college are fudged, your analogy isn't entirely right. You can't simply extrapolate some constant rate of speed and compare athletes. In addition, they weren't all going a constant acceleration. Each athlete would have different lengths and and values of acceleration, and in some cases some might have actually only held a steady velocity or were even decelerating for some period of time. There is just way too much variability to make such a connection.

However, I agree that Olympic athletes are going to be faster than just about all football players.