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The 40 yards of football's signature sprint are as important a distance as any player ever runs. Too bad no one quite knows why!
By Eddie Matz
ESPN The Magazine
According to NFL math, the difference between a 4.5- and 4.4-second 40-yard dash isn't 0.1. It's millions.
This story appears in the Feb. 21, 2011 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
FIVE SECONDS. That's more than enough time to finish the 40-yard dash for all but the biggest and slowest of those men asked to run it. For modern sports science, it's also plenty long enough to dissect the act into three phases. Blame Sun Tzu, who declared, "Speed is the essence of war." Blame 40 forefather Paul Brown, who took that maxim and ran (and ran). Most of all, blame NFL math, which tells us the difference between 4.5 and 4.4 isn't 0.1, but millions. Somewhere between Point A and Point B the 40 has grown much more significant than a simple wind sprint, offering hard-core coaches and casual fans alike a simple tool to analyze a complex sport and its specialized players. Break it down, though, and the 40 isn't so simple at all.
DRIVE
THE INITIAL SEGMENT of the 40-yard dash lasts seven steps. Coiled in a stance with their strongest leg forward and their weight on their opposite hand, runners explode out, not up, and stay low at a 45-degree angle as they accelerate. Track folks call it the drive. For burners like Raiders receiver Jacoby Ford, the fastest man at the 2010 NFL scouting combine, the drive lasts all of 1.45 seconds. Maybe 1.42 seconds. Or 1.49. In the end, it depends on who holds the stopwatch.
Getting an accurate read on the start of a 40 is as tricky as getting an accurate read on the 40's start. Legend has it that Paul Brown invented the short sprint while coaching at Ohio State in the early 1940s. Given that Brown is pretty much the Thomas Edison of football -- among his innovations: the playbook and the face mask -- the creation myth isn't hard to swallow.
And yet it's news to historian Jack Park, who has written four books about the Buckeyes, including The Official Ohio State Football Encyclopedia, which was dedicated to Brown and his 1942 national championship team, and for which the author interviewed the coaching great four separate times. Not once in their conversations did Brown mention he invented the dash. And it's news to Brown's eldest son, Mike, who, besides being the current owner of the Bengals, is the verifier of all things about his late father. Mike, who was born in 1937, four years before the Paul Brown era began in Columbus, has no recollection of his pops pushing the 40 on his Buckeye charges. It's even news to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. According to his bio on the Hall's website, Brown was the first coach to use IQ tests, to sequester his team the night before a game and to send in plays from the sideline. Nowhere is he credited with the 40-yard dash.
The one person to whom this origin story is not news is Gene Fekete. "Coach Brown would make us run from the goal line to the 40-yard line," says the former fullback who played on that '42 team. "He stood at the finish with a timer. I had never run wind sprints like that before."
Of course, Fekete's take doesn't prove Brown invented the 40. When it comes to corroboration, you want something more airtight than the 68-year-old memories of a near nonagenarian. Still, Fekete's flashback provides convincing evidence that Brown used the 40 in the early '40s.
By 1946, Brown was coach of the fledgling Cleveland Browns, and that's where Mike Brown first remembers seeing the 40. "Nowadays, they run the thing practically naked," he says. "But my dad used to have them run it in full pads." Brown mostly used the drill to measure fitness, not potential. Still, back in the days of 200-pound linemen, if a blocker couldn't break 4.8, he was on the first bus out of Cleveland.
One thing that hasn't changed -- besides the distance, which Brown says his father chose because it was the farthest a player would ever run on a particular play -- is the amount of debate surrounding the 40. Says the younger Brown: "Coaches took turns timing, so there was never consistency." It irked the players so much that Paul Brown brought in the Baldwin-Wallace College track coach, Eddie Finnigan, to clock the guys. From that point forward, Finnigan was the official timer of the Cleveland Browns. That's how serious Paul Brown was about the 40.
TRANSITION
THE MIDDLE PHASE of the 40-yard dash, a.k.a. the transition, is all about form and focus. Stay relaxed, keep the arms inside, pumping in rhythm, and the legs moving straight ahead, not side-to-side. Any unnecessary tension or lateral movement will slow a runner down.
The transition takes roughly two seconds, but it took the 40 more than 20 years to navigate its own transition from training camp gasser to predraft requirement. Gil Brandt remembers visiting Oxford, Miss., early in 1960, where he watched Ole Miss coach Johnny Vaught make his players run 50- and 100-yard dashes over and over. Football track, Vaught called it. Brandt, the Dallas Cowboys' original vice president of player personnel, couldn't rush back to Big D quickly enough. At team headquarters on North Central Expressway, he huddled with GM Tex Schramm and coach Tom Landry. Football track, he preached, could revolutionize scouting. "Tom felt you could coach a guy to get stronger," says Brandt, "but it was hard to make a guy faster."
Two years later, the Cowboys laid the foundation for what we now refer to as pro day. They sent scouts to more than 50 colleges, where they timed players in the 40 (Brown's distance was more relevant to football, they thought, than Vaught's traditional track distances). Other NFL teams laughed. "They all thought we were stupid," says Brandt. "Until we started winning championships." In 1966, the Cowboys had their first winning season and made it to the league championship game behind Olympic sprinter-turned-wideout "Bullet" Bob Hayes, whom they had drafted two years earlier. In each of the next seven years, Dallas went to the playoffs. By then, those 40-lovin' Boys didn't seem so stupid.
Except for when they did. Brandt recalls a scout who returned from the University of Idaho bragging about a kid who'd run an unheard-of 4.27. Brandt sent the scout right back again, this time with a tape measure. Turns out, the track was 38.5 yards long. "After that," says Brandt, "we insisted our scouts carry a tape measure."
By the late 1970s, most NFL franchises were sending around scouts to clock prospects. But now they were more selective. "If you went to work a guy out," says longtime Oilers/Titans scout C.O. Brocato, "he had to be special." One such gem was Earl Campbell, the 1977 Heisman winner. Brocato stood on the AstroTurf in Austin and clocked the 230-pound running back at a sluggish 4.75. Which didn't for a second stop Houston from taking Campbell first overall, or Campbell from becoming one of the greatest backs in NFL history. "All I know," says Brocato, "is that once you put that football in Earl's hands, nobody ever caught him."
Campbell's poor showing may have been due to fatigue. Pro days were the only time players worked out for scouts. As a result, studs like Campbell ran the 40 so often they eventually grew exhausted. "Those poor kids," says Brocato. "They ran two to four a day, every day." That changed in 1982, when Tampa played host to the first National Invitational Camp. Now known as the combine, the four-day meat market featured medical checkups, personal interviews and a certain 120-foot sprint that nobody wanted to miss. Just like that, the 40 was mainstream.
ABSOLUTE
STUDIES SHOW SPRINTERS don't reach absolute top speed until 55 meters. That's why gurus tell their charges to forget the lean and run through the finish. Make it a 45-yard dash. At 1989's combine, Deion Sanders ran a then-record 4.26 40 (Chris Johnson's 4.24 nudged past that in 2009). Sanders was so geared up in the final part of the run -- the absolute phase -- that he kept chugging all the way into the Hoosier Dome tunnel.
Today's dash is firmly ensconced in its own absolute phase. Basketball shuns the 40 (to be fair, courts are barely 30 yards long), and baseball prefers the 60 (the distance from home to first to second). But in football, the 40 is a runaway train.
These days, virtually all of the 300-plus combine participants spend January and February training at specialized, off-campus facilities. Agents typically foot the bill, which can run upward of $20,000 per client. It's an investment. "A fast 40 can be worth millions of dollars," says Chip Smith, founder of Competitive Edge Sports. While 40 prep isn't the only priority, it's pretty important. Some combine trainers dedicate three entire days per week to it.
"It's a choreographed dance," says Brett Bech, a speed specialist at Athletes Performance. "We teach where every toe and finger goes, torso angles, how many strides to take." (Speedsters like Johnson use 18; bruisers like Jake Long, 21.) But just because trainers obsess over the 40 doesn't mean they like it. "I hate the stinkin' 40," says Smith. "Why is a 4.8 guy always the first downfield on kickoffs? It's called 'want-to,' and the 40 doesn't measure that." Agent Steve Caric agrees: "The 40 is completely overrated."
A different set of numbers bolsters his assessment. The Raiders' Ford followed up his combine-best 4.28 with fewer catches, yards and touchdowns than fellow rookie Bengal Jordan Shipley, who ran a 4.60. LeGarrette Blount, whose 4.70 was the slowest among running backs last February, rushed for 1,007 yards for the Bucs. That's 452 yards more than the fastest back, Lions rook Jahvid Best (4.35), collected. And the Browns' Joe Haden (4.58), who ran what speed coach Tom Shaw calls a "pathetically slow time for a cornerback," snagged six picks in his first year in the league.
And yet the 40 and its simple apple-to-apple quantifying still captivates. "People want to see who is fastest," says Ford. Mike Brown says the 40 still serves his pop's purpose, too: "Watching a kid run tells you if he's really healthy or not."
Still, football men know there are more valid skills than a four-second-and-change slice of time. "The 40 is just one overused piece of the puzzle," says Bills exec Tom Modrak. "Playing speed on tape is the most important thing."
Paul Brown knew that, of course. He invented film study, too.
By Eddie Matz
ESPN The Magazine
According to NFL math, the difference between a 4.5- and 4.4-second 40-yard dash isn't 0.1. It's millions.
This story appears in the Feb. 21, 2011 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
FIVE SECONDS. That's more than enough time to finish the 40-yard dash for all but the biggest and slowest of those men asked to run it. For modern sports science, it's also plenty long enough to dissect the act into three phases. Blame Sun Tzu, who declared, "Speed is the essence of war." Blame 40 forefather Paul Brown, who took that maxim and ran (and ran). Most of all, blame NFL math, which tells us the difference between 4.5 and 4.4 isn't 0.1, but millions. Somewhere between Point A and Point B the 40 has grown much more significant than a simple wind sprint, offering hard-core coaches and casual fans alike a simple tool to analyze a complex sport and its specialized players. Break it down, though, and the 40 isn't so simple at all.
DRIVE
THE INITIAL SEGMENT of the 40-yard dash lasts seven steps. Coiled in a stance with their strongest leg forward and their weight on their opposite hand, runners explode out, not up, and stay low at a 45-degree angle as they accelerate. Track folks call it the drive. For burners like Raiders receiver Jacoby Ford, the fastest man at the 2010 NFL scouting combine, the drive lasts all of 1.45 seconds. Maybe 1.42 seconds. Or 1.49. In the end, it depends on who holds the stopwatch.
Getting an accurate read on the start of a 40 is as tricky as getting an accurate read on the 40's start. Legend has it that Paul Brown invented the short sprint while coaching at Ohio State in the early 1940s. Given that Brown is pretty much the Thomas Edison of football -- among his innovations: the playbook and the face mask -- the creation myth isn't hard to swallow.
And yet it's news to historian Jack Park, who has written four books about the Buckeyes, including The Official Ohio State Football Encyclopedia, which was dedicated to Brown and his 1942 national championship team, and for which the author interviewed the coaching great four separate times. Not once in their conversations did Brown mention he invented the dash. And it's news to Brown's eldest son, Mike, who, besides being the current owner of the Bengals, is the verifier of all things about his late father. Mike, who was born in 1937, four years before the Paul Brown era began in Columbus, has no recollection of his pops pushing the 40 on his Buckeye charges. It's even news to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. According to his bio on the Hall's website, Brown was the first coach to use IQ tests, to sequester his team the night before a game and to send in plays from the sideline. Nowhere is he credited with the 40-yard dash.
The one person to whom this origin story is not news is Gene Fekete. "Coach Brown would make us run from the goal line to the 40-yard line," says the former fullback who played on that '42 team. "He stood at the finish with a timer. I had never run wind sprints like that before."
Of course, Fekete's take doesn't prove Brown invented the 40. When it comes to corroboration, you want something more airtight than the 68-year-old memories of a near nonagenarian. Still, Fekete's flashback provides convincing evidence that Brown used the 40 in the early '40s.
By 1946, Brown was coach of the fledgling Cleveland Browns, and that's where Mike Brown first remembers seeing the 40. "Nowadays, they run the thing practically naked," he says. "But my dad used to have them run it in full pads." Brown mostly used the drill to measure fitness, not potential. Still, back in the days of 200-pound linemen, if a blocker couldn't break 4.8, he was on the first bus out of Cleveland.
One thing that hasn't changed -- besides the distance, which Brown says his father chose because it was the farthest a player would ever run on a particular play -- is the amount of debate surrounding the 40. Says the younger Brown: "Coaches took turns timing, so there was never consistency." It irked the players so much that Paul Brown brought in the Baldwin-Wallace College track coach, Eddie Finnigan, to clock the guys. From that point forward, Finnigan was the official timer of the Cleveland Browns. That's how serious Paul Brown was about the 40.
TRANSITION
THE MIDDLE PHASE of the 40-yard dash, a.k.a. the transition, is all about form and focus. Stay relaxed, keep the arms inside, pumping in rhythm, and the legs moving straight ahead, not side-to-side. Any unnecessary tension or lateral movement will slow a runner down.
The transition takes roughly two seconds, but it took the 40 more than 20 years to navigate its own transition from training camp gasser to predraft requirement. Gil Brandt remembers visiting Oxford, Miss., early in 1960, where he watched Ole Miss coach Johnny Vaught make his players run 50- and 100-yard dashes over and over. Football track, Vaught called it. Brandt, the Dallas Cowboys' original vice president of player personnel, couldn't rush back to Big D quickly enough. At team headquarters on North Central Expressway, he huddled with GM Tex Schramm and coach Tom Landry. Football track, he preached, could revolutionize scouting. "Tom felt you could coach a guy to get stronger," says Brandt, "but it was hard to make a guy faster."
Two years later, the Cowboys laid the foundation for what we now refer to as pro day. They sent scouts to more than 50 colleges, where they timed players in the 40 (Brown's distance was more relevant to football, they thought, than Vaught's traditional track distances). Other NFL teams laughed. "They all thought we were stupid," says Brandt. "Until we started winning championships." In 1966, the Cowboys had their first winning season and made it to the league championship game behind Olympic sprinter-turned-wideout "Bullet" Bob Hayes, whom they had drafted two years earlier. In each of the next seven years, Dallas went to the playoffs. By then, those 40-lovin' Boys didn't seem so stupid.
Except for when they did. Brandt recalls a scout who returned from the University of Idaho bragging about a kid who'd run an unheard-of 4.27. Brandt sent the scout right back again, this time with a tape measure. Turns out, the track was 38.5 yards long. "After that," says Brandt, "we insisted our scouts carry a tape measure."
By the late 1970s, most NFL franchises were sending around scouts to clock prospects. But now they were more selective. "If you went to work a guy out," says longtime Oilers/Titans scout C.O. Brocato, "he had to be special." One such gem was Earl Campbell, the 1977 Heisman winner. Brocato stood on the AstroTurf in Austin and clocked the 230-pound running back at a sluggish 4.75. Which didn't for a second stop Houston from taking Campbell first overall, or Campbell from becoming one of the greatest backs in NFL history. "All I know," says Brocato, "is that once you put that football in Earl's hands, nobody ever caught him."
Campbell's poor showing may have been due to fatigue. Pro days were the only time players worked out for scouts. As a result, studs like Campbell ran the 40 so often they eventually grew exhausted. "Those poor kids," says Brocato. "They ran two to four a day, every day." That changed in 1982, when Tampa played host to the first National Invitational Camp. Now known as the combine, the four-day meat market featured medical checkups, personal interviews and a certain 120-foot sprint that nobody wanted to miss. Just like that, the 40 was mainstream.
ABSOLUTE
STUDIES SHOW SPRINTERS don't reach absolute top speed until 55 meters. That's why gurus tell their charges to forget the lean and run through the finish. Make it a 45-yard dash. At 1989's combine, Deion Sanders ran a then-record 4.26 40 (Chris Johnson's 4.24 nudged past that in 2009). Sanders was so geared up in the final part of the run -- the absolute phase -- that he kept chugging all the way into the Hoosier Dome tunnel.
Today's dash is firmly ensconced in its own absolute phase. Basketball shuns the 40 (to be fair, courts are barely 30 yards long), and baseball prefers the 60 (the distance from home to first to second). But in football, the 40 is a runaway train.
These days, virtually all of the 300-plus combine participants spend January and February training at specialized, off-campus facilities. Agents typically foot the bill, which can run upward of $20,000 per client. It's an investment. "A fast 40 can be worth millions of dollars," says Chip Smith, founder of Competitive Edge Sports. While 40 prep isn't the only priority, it's pretty important. Some combine trainers dedicate three entire days per week to it.
"It's a choreographed dance," says Brett Bech, a speed specialist at Athletes Performance. "We teach where every toe and finger goes, torso angles, how many strides to take." (Speedsters like Johnson use 18; bruisers like Jake Long, 21.) But just because trainers obsess over the 40 doesn't mean they like it. "I hate the stinkin' 40," says Smith. "Why is a 4.8 guy always the first downfield on kickoffs? It's called 'want-to,' and the 40 doesn't measure that." Agent Steve Caric agrees: "The 40 is completely overrated."
A different set of numbers bolsters his assessment. The Raiders' Ford followed up his combine-best 4.28 with fewer catches, yards and touchdowns than fellow rookie Bengal Jordan Shipley, who ran a 4.60. LeGarrette Blount, whose 4.70 was the slowest among running backs last February, rushed for 1,007 yards for the Bucs. That's 452 yards more than the fastest back, Lions rook Jahvid Best (4.35), collected. And the Browns' Joe Haden (4.58), who ran what speed coach Tom Shaw calls a "pathetically slow time for a cornerback," snagged six picks in his first year in the league.
And yet the 40 and its simple apple-to-apple quantifying still captivates. "People want to see who is fastest," says Ford. Mike Brown says the 40 still serves his pop's purpose, too: "Watching a kid run tells you if he's really healthy or not."
Still, football men know there are more valid skills than a four-second-and-change slice of time. "The 40 is just one overused piece of the puzzle," says Bills exec Tom Modrak. "Playing speed on tape is the most important thing."
Paul Brown knew that, of course. He invented film study, too.
