YardRat
04-20-2008, 05:08 AM
http://www.insidebayarea.com/sanmateocountytimes/ci_8992460
A player's 40-yard time is important, but not the overriding factor in a decision whether to draft him, 49ers coach Mike Nolan said.
"If you're trying to put a track team together, this is really valuable," Nolan said. "If you're trying to put a football team together, it's helpful but not the deciding factor. If you draft off the combine, you can make a lot of mistakes."
One potential mistake would be to trust the accuracy of the times provided. For all the import placed on the 40-yard dash, the NFL still hasn't figured out a way to time players in a precise manner.
There isn't a single official time at the combine. Three times are provided for each run. Two come from hand-held stopwatches. The third comes from the combination of a hand-started watch and an electronically stopped timer.
Each player is allowed to run twice if he so chooses. Therefore, there are six potential times, all of which are provided to the league's 32 teams.
Some teams go with the fastest electronically stopped time. Others throw out the fastest and slowest times and use the average of the remainder. Still more go with the fastest time provided.
Teams such as the Raiders rely upon their own times. They hope to achieve consistency by using the same person on the stopwatch year after year. They also have formulas for factoring in whether a player ran on grass, dirt or artificial turf.
Even so, there are those who question the validity of the 40-yard times because of the human element involved. It is widely accepted in the track community that a hand-timed race can be off by as much as .25 of a second — some estimates go as high as one-half second — usually resulting in a faster time.
That's the blink of an eye, on the surface. In football terms, though, one-quarter of a second, or more, can mean the difference of several rounds as to where a player is drafted. Worse, that could be the difference between a 3-yard run and a 63-yard run in a game if a defender is a split-second late at the point of contact.
Buffalo Bills vice president of player personnel Dwight Adams also is a proponent of implementing full electronic timing at the scouting combine.
"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," Adams said in an interview with FoxSports.com last year. "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."
More evidence of 40 times assigned to NFL players being erroneous and overblown comes in the form of former Olympics gold-medal winner Ben Johnson's world-record time 20 years ago.
Johnson set the world record in the 100 meters with an electronically timed 9.79 seconds in the 1988 Summer Games in Korea. His 40-yard time was estimated at 4.26.
A player's 40-yard time is important, but not the overriding factor in a decision whether to draft him, 49ers coach Mike Nolan said.
"If you're trying to put a track team together, this is really valuable," Nolan said. "If you're trying to put a football team together, it's helpful but not the deciding factor. If you draft off the combine, you can make a lot of mistakes."
One potential mistake would be to trust the accuracy of the times provided. For all the import placed on the 40-yard dash, the NFL still hasn't figured out a way to time players in a precise manner.
There isn't a single official time at the combine. Three times are provided for each run. Two come from hand-held stopwatches. The third comes from the combination of a hand-started watch and an electronically stopped timer.
Each player is allowed to run twice if he so chooses. Therefore, there are six potential times, all of which are provided to the league's 32 teams.
Some teams go with the fastest electronically stopped time. Others throw out the fastest and slowest times and use the average of the remainder. Still more go with the fastest time provided.
Teams such as the Raiders rely upon their own times. They hope to achieve consistency by using the same person on the stopwatch year after year. They also have formulas for factoring in whether a player ran on grass, dirt or artificial turf.
Even so, there are those who question the validity of the 40-yard times because of the human element involved. It is widely accepted in the track community that a hand-timed race can be off by as much as .25 of a second — some estimates go as high as one-half second — usually resulting in a faster time.
That's the blink of an eye, on the surface. In football terms, though, one-quarter of a second, or more, can mean the difference of several rounds as to where a player is drafted. Worse, that could be the difference between a 3-yard run and a 63-yard run in a game if a defender is a split-second late at the point of contact.
Buffalo Bills vice president of player personnel Dwight Adams also is a proponent of implementing full electronic timing at the scouting combine.
"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," Adams said in an interview with FoxSports.com last year. "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."
More evidence of 40 times assigned to NFL players being erroneous and overblown comes in the form of former Olympics gold-medal winner Ben Johnson's world-record time 20 years ago.
Johnson set the world record in the 100 meters with an electronically timed 9.79 seconds in the 1988 Summer Games in Korea. His 40-yard time was estimated at 4.26.