Editor’s note: The following column is a guest editorial from Brandon Herring, the strength and conditioning coach for Hewitt-Trussville High School.
The 40-yard dash is used as a key performance indicator for speed at all levels of football, from the youngest players all the way to college and pros. It has become a spectacle on television at the NFL combine.
“What’s his 40 time?” is a question that has been asked an untold number of times about football athletes. But are 40-yard dash times actually a good metric to determine whether a football player is good at the sport?
Supposedly, this metric comes from legendary coach Paul Brown in the 1950s. The story: Brown was trying to figure out which players to put on his punt team. Using 40 yards as an average punt distance, players were lined up and told to run as fast as they could for 40 yards in order to determine who could cover the punt best.
In theory, especially in the 1950’s, this would seem like a good indicator of whom to place on the punt team. But here’s the issue: When does a football player ever line up and run 40 yards as fast as he can, unimpeded? The punt team must block first before releasing to cover the kick and defenders in turn are trying to block them for the punt returner after the kick.
It’s extremely rare that a football player ever runs any distance without first having to make sport skill-related decisions.
At the professional level, the 40 yard dash has become a television spectacle at the draft combine. These athletes will train with private coaches for 8-12 weeks with the specific goal of running the fastest time possible. Already being freakishly good athletes, they learn how to run a good 40. A lot goes into it: the setup and stance, the first step explosion, the angle of the body during initial acceleration, placement of foot strikes under the hip, the gradual rise in the drive phase, the transition to the cycle phase and finally the top end speed mechanics needed to maximize the athletes potential.
And after the athlete posts his time, he never runs a 40 yard dash again in his career.
As a strength and conditioning coach, I believe the 40 yard dash is a poor indicator of how good a player can be in the sport of football. I’ve been around many players who can post a really fast time but aren’t very good football players. On the flip side, I’ve been around players who post average times that are really good players.
Why? Because skills and instincts for the sport are hard to quantify but allow a player to “play faster than he is.” If you take a player who studies and understands the game and teach him to move efficiently, he seems to always be in a position to succeed.
At Hewitt-Trussville, we speed train our football players year-round. We work to improve their max velocity as much as possible over a four-year period. Sprinting may very well be the best central nervous system stimulator there is, so we use it as a training stimulus on a weekly basis. We also teach all the important components of running the 40 because we want our players to have the best possible chance of performing well at college prospect camps. But, as far as actually timing the 40? We very seldom do it.
The 40 doesn’t tell the whole story. What’s happening inside of those 40 yards is important. An athlete may have very good initial acceleration and poor max velocity. Or vice-versa. But if you only time the whole 40 yards from start to finish, how do you ever know?
By timing splits — 0-10 yards, 10-20 yards, 20-30 yards and 30-40 yards — we can see where each athlete is strong and where he is weak and then make programming decisions in order to help him improve in his weak areas.
For example, we had a player going on a camp circuit last summer. Because I had timed hundreds of splits at each of these distances, I knew this player was really fast in the 30-40 yard segment but was average in the 0-10. I advised him not to run the 40 if at all possible, as his time would end up “average” because of his initial acceleration issues. At camp No. 1, they made him run the 40. No offer.
Two weeks later he went to another camp and they did not make him run the 40 but they did put a GPS unit on him, which I knew would happen, and he hit 22 MPH in competition during the 7-on-7 portion of camp. After the camp was over he was brought into the head coaches office where he was offered a scholarship.
Another issue with looking at 40 times is that many who make the decisions of whether to offer a prospect a scholarship don’t understand these things and many have an inflated sense of what a “good” time actually is. I know this because I was once a college coach making those decisions. I was clueless.
We continued to work on the aforementioned player’s acceleration throughout the season and in late October he was posting his best times.
For the player that may not have the ability to play in college, the 40 can be a source of anxiety.They are comparing their times to what they hear in the media and that can ruin their confidence. By timing splits we are able to focus on certain qualities to help all players become better athletes.
At Hewitt-Trussville, we spend a great deal of time on what we call “game speed,” which encompasses max velocity, but we focus heavily on acceleration, change of direction and agility. These qualities are what the game is built upon.
The ability to accelerate quickly helps players separate from defenders or close the distance to the ball. Changing directions quickly and efficiently is a must in order to make someone miss or to stay in “phase” with the ball. Agility is the ability to do all these things based on a stimulus — also known as the skills and instincts for the game.
Follow Brandon Herring on Twitter: @BrandonHerring0.