When it comes to field sports speed is king. It is of course beneficial to have excellent strength and skills but out of all athletic talents speed is the most desirable and often has the biggest influence on the outcome of a competition.
When it comes down to making a team the fastest players are the ones who are drafted the highest. Even when looking at a player in a position that doesn’t require much speed (EX: an NFL lineman), a faster player at that position will get drafted higher than the slower player. This is because even though that extra speed may not be on display often it still displays higher power output and explosiveness.
If you have enough speed to run past an opposing player then you have eliminated their strength and size as they never had a chance to use them.
Strength and size can be built rather quickly but speed is something that takes years to develop and even then most people will never reach elite speed levels.
So how many people in the United States can actually run a 4.3 forty yard dash?
The way we will come to our final results is by taking into account speed times of professional athletes in football and track & field.
Starting with football.
A 40 yard dash time is blazing fast and although most people know it is indeed fast you may not know how fast it truly is.
Related: How To Accurately Measure Sprint Times Without A Laser Timer
For some reference lets take a look at the 2018 NFL Combine. We will look at the most athletic positions: wide receivers, defensive backs, linebackers, and running backs.
- Only 2 out of 44 wide receivers were able to run below a 4.4. (4.5%)
- Only 8 out of 70 defensive backs were able to run below a 4.4. (11%)
- Only 1 out of 42 linebackers were able to run below a 4.4. (2.4%)
- Only 1 out of 32 running backs were able to run below a 4.4. (3.1%)
Out of these 188 elite athletes invited to the 2018 NFL Combine only a total of 12 athletes were able to run under a 4.4.
So how many athletes total in the NFL run a 4.3?
This list shows exactly how many players on each NFL team run under a 4.4
*The fastest team in football, The Kansas City Chiefs have 5 players that run under a 4.4:
- Chris Conley
- Tyreek Hill
- Orlando Scandrick
- Tremon Smith
- Sammy Watkins
Out of the total 1,696 players in the NFL only 112 can run under a 4.4 (6%).
Now lets look at track and field sprinters. Surely they will have more athletes capable of running a 4.3?
32 men at the 2018 USA Track and Field Championships ran under a 10.5 100m dash with the fastest time recorded at 9.98 and the slowest time being recorded at 10.48.
These 32 men were covering ground so quickly that they practically averaged 10m per second throughout 100m. Although we have to take into consideration that the start is often the slowest part of the 100m dash this still means that they covered 40m in about 4 seconds. When you convert that to yards you get 43 yards in 4 seconds.
It is a confident statement to say that each one of these 32 men could easily run a 4.3 forty dash and most likely even faster considering they ran 43 yards in 4 seconds flat.
This chart above was created with phenomenal research to show the correlation between 100m dash and 40 yard dash times. As the chart shows, any person capable of running under a 10.6 100m is capable of running a 4.3 forty yard dash further proving that these 32 men all run under 4.4.
At the 2018 NCAA Division 1 Championships all 24 men also ran under a 10.6 100m, adding them to our list of qualified 4.3 runners. However there are also handfuls of other men throughout the nation’s colleges that run under a 10.6 that did not compete at this year’s championships.
There are also hundreds of high school athletes that have been recorded under a 10.6 but all of the data is not accessible yet.
It is merely impossible to gather the exact number of people in the United States capable of running a 4.3 40 yard dash but if we were to give a generous number based on what we could see in this data above, we could confidently say 500 people or less in all of the U.S. can run a 4.3.
USA Population – 325.7 million
500/325.7m = 0.0001
Male Population – 151.8 million
500/151.8m = 0.0003
Male Population aged 18-30 – 93.1 million
500/93.1m = 0.0005
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