There's a good deal of mythology around 40 times. Kenjon Barber is a pretty fast guy, and he didn't get under 4.5. What does that say about the published numbers we see for guys?
had he not tried to cover the final yard on his back.
Says he should be ok for pro day.tough break
As a senior in high school.
HS times are poorly timed, officially or unofficially. Always add .1 or .2 to a HS time to get a real reading.
I hate to keep beating the "official" drum, but unofficial times have no value and should be disregarded completely.
As a side note, I was surprised that Kenjon Barner only ran a 4.52. I thought he'd be much quicker.
They rely on the human eye-hand to start the clock. Only the finish is "electronic".
NFL Network did an overlay of two guys that supposedly finished more than 0.1 seconds apart. They were essentially stride for stride and I'd guess the winner was may be 6" ahead at the finish line. It was a perfect illustration of the unreliability of even the "official" times.
Do you have a source? I've actually tried to look up info on this many times and failed, but was told by someone on this board that the start was also laser timed.
Here's what I know: The digital video that they use these days has a running "timeline" in the background, and the ability to insert digital tags. This allows multiple cameras to be synced together. The laser could be used to insert a tag in the video at the official stop time. They could subsequently go back in the replay, watch it in slow motion, and manually insert a tag at "first flinch." The time between the tags is then your official time.
I don't know if this is the method they use, and I don't know the accuracy or tolerances, but I do know that it's plausible. Regardless, much less room for error than a guy with a stopwatch. Any thoughts?
that is why they have the guy hold his stance for at least 3 seconds to make sure he isn't getting a "rolling" start.
I don't know about now, but 20 years ago when I was timed with an electronic start and stop it was easy to cheat the start if you could learn how to coil up and roll into the start.
And per the linked article:
Officials with National Football Scouting ... confirmed that fully automated timing, used in a secret experiment last year, are not being utilized in the popular 40-yard dash event that began Saturday morning. The results of last year's experiment with fully automated timing were revealed only to "a small committee of two or three," according to one NFL team executive, who guessed that the times were so high they might "take the luster off the star in this show."
Football uses a combination of hand-held watches and an electronic beam. On any one 40-yard run at the combine, a player has three times. Two are started and stopped by hand-held watches and one that is started by hand and ended by an electronic beam.
I thought it was electronic on both ends, but that's apparently only 1/3 of the final outcome.
I guess I'm too science-oriented to even fathom why they want to have less accurate information, but I'm not in charge of managing TV ratings.
That is pretty much exactly as expected. Woods time is good for 13th out of 33 RBs.
Sub 4.6. Wood's time was good enough. Stephon Taylor ran a 4.76.