Thoughts on the 40

As a free safety I think I ran full speed on average twice a game.  I was a 6'2" 210 pound kid with a 4.5 playing small college football...so naturally there was little need to ever run at full speed.  The irony as a safety...the slower you play the better off you are.

It sounds blasphemes when any football player says they don't go full speed...but it's not.  When playing with 10 other guys...you have to understand fits.  You have to understand space in coverage, when to pass off routes.  None of those situations call for full speed.

I learned that the hard way...over pursuing, vacating zones too quickly, taking shortcuts with footwork (rounding).  In time the slower I played the better football player I became.  Taking time in my read steps, keeping my balance, cleaning up my footwork for breaks.

The majority of runs are going to end after 5 yards...majority of passes will end in 10...the game isn't played 40 yards at a time.  That's my contention with 40 yard times...it's a track and field measurement...it rarely serves as an adequate football measurement.

For the wide receivers on a 9 and the corners that defend them...it has a place along with other examples.  But generally the game is played low...for the corners to the line...the gains are made before the ball is in the air or the QB hands off the ball.  Those gains are made when you are playing low.

A 40 has two key phases...an acceleration phase (drive phase), and a deceleration phase.  When a player gets crouched it mirrors the crouches taken in football.  That crouch lengthens the quad, giving it a full range of motion (quad is dominant muscle in football)...it's important for explosion (squat, jump).  So that part of the 40 can be applied to the game.

The other phase (majority of 40) isn't a football measurement...it isn't even a speed measurement.  In a sprint after the first phase at the start that is largely quad dominant...deceleration happens.  An athlete's ability to decrease the degree of acceleration is paramount.

Athletes do this by turning their hips, streamlining their motion, and making their stride more efficient.  This particular motion...that happens with all runners in the 40...is largely non-existent in the game of football for most positions.

Most of football is played in that drive phase...the hips are rarely turned and typically players are taught to turn hips on contact.  That's my fundamental problem with the 40 being an adequate football measurement...because it measures a motion that few football players will ever use.