Denard versus Usain Bolt: Fight!

Maybe in the 20 yard dash...?

But Denard's not on the juice, so there's that.

  Denard has never actually been challenged, so you can't be sure he wouldn't be packing extra dilithium for the big race.  He has another gear... just hasn't been forced to use it.

"So… plausible for Denard to be in Bolt's stratsophere? No."

It should be...

So...plausible for Bolt to be in Denard's stratosphere? Of course not, he actually ties his shoes for one thing.

Denard might not be able to beat Bolt in the 40.  But something tells me that he would come a lot closer to replicating Bolt's speed than Bolt would come to replicating Denard's football ability.

How has no one mentioned Justin Gatlin's 40 time at the NFL combine in 2008? "WR Justin Gatlin (5-11 7/8, 195): Ran a 4.45 and a 4.42 in the 40". If you watch this year's 100m final you can see Gatlin has a slight lead at around the 40 yard mark. I think the moral of the story here is that a football 40 yard dash (no blocks, timer starts on movement, etc) and a 100m split time (blocks, time begins on gun, etc) are hard to compare. We can all agree that Denard is fast (but not an Olympic caliber sprinter), and Bolt is the fastest man who has ever lived.

A few observations from this post.

"So… plausible for Denard to be in Bolt's stratsophere":  I'm not sure why this question is even asked.  Denard never said he was in the same stratsophere, he just said that he could beat him in the 40.

"Denard's fast. He's not Usain Bolt.":  Again, what is the point of this statement?

So I'm a little confused, this post suggests that Denard cannot beat Usain in the 40, but the proof provided suggests that he can.

At the 40ydish mark roughly seven of the finalists in the 100m dash are stride for stride (including Usain Bolt): http://www.sbnation.com/london-olympics-2012/2012/8/5/3221941/usain-bolt-100m-video-2012-olympics

This makes me think it seems plausible that there could be a few dozen track guys out there (possibly including guys like Denard & Chris Johnson) that could more or less keep pace for 40 yds.  It also makes me think that there probably isn't anyone out there on earth who is significantly (more than half a step) going to beat these guys over 40yds.  But as you can see, the 100 is all about the last 60m.

Also, Odoms beat Denard, so there's that too: http://mgoblog.com/content/nebraska-postgame-presser-transcript-players

would pay $5 for Mott's if we made this happen at Michigan Stadium?

Maybe if Denard spent everyday training to sprint instead of training to avoid LB's trying to crush him he'd have a shot.  But football guys are football fast, track guys are track fast.

I mentioned the Gatlin thing earlier today in a blog post ...

http://4eversaturday.blogspot.com/2012/08/denard-usain-bolt-and-bunch-of-math.html

... and based on a lot of math of debatable value, I do think some of the elite speed guys in football could at least challenge Bolt and other sprinters through 40 yards. As mentioned above, the 100 is all about maintaining top speed, which is usually reached somewhere past the halfway mark.

I hope everyone is sufficiently wound up about it. I noticed that both Denard and Desmond are still smiling.

You're either first or last.

If the runners had to slip past a safety at 20 meters, then my money's on Denard.  I don't think Bolt has the wiggle.

He could keep up through 40 but get killed beyond that.

If we're going to dream and argue and speculate, why don't we do that about that Al Borges is coming up with for the latest QB "Oh Noes" constraint play will be?  With the experience of our OL Tackles, and Denard's experience giving him more calm in the pocket, I expect to see a lot of Denard scanning 2-3 reads, then stepping up with an option to juke the spying middle LB or then hitting the seam over an aggresive safety sprinting in off coverage.

And why aren't we discussing the new bread and butter play of Gardner faking a bubble screen for a throw-back to Denard as a new wrinkle to the Lloyd Carr, throwback to QB for the Navarre rumblin' bumblin' stumblin' TD play?

seriously people, WTF?

"la gente está muy loca"

If Denard had chosen to train for track instead of football, I wonder how their times would compare. Most athletes in the US train for one of the major sports. The nationalist in me thinks the US has the world's best athletes. I wonder too what they could do to track records and other olympic records if they trained for other events instead...

10 meter dash, MAKE IT HAPPEN!

At best, Brian may be right, but for the wrong reason.

The Usain Bolt-to-football player comparisons have always struck me as a bit weird, because football speed is all about explosiveness over short spaces. That's why football players only run 40 yards. Usain Bolt's biggest weakness in sprints is his starting ability; as has already been noted, his starts are unespectacular in sprinting terms and he does not start to assert his superiority until the drive phase of the sprint has been completed and he is able to use his full strides to cover more ground per stride than any other runner. 

The key physiological difference with Usain Bolt, then, is his stride length at full speed--a situation that is rare on a football field and basically irrelevant in the 40 yard dash.

You'll note that with a few exceptions (Randy Moss, Calvin Johnson) most of the fastest 40-time football players are on the short-to-average side. Think Reggie Bush, Barry Sanders, Trindon Holliday, Darren Sproles, and... Denard Robinson. I would speculate that this is a consequence of lower body weight and compact frames that have natural leverage to accelerate quickly, getting them up to top speed faster. Now, their top speeds may not be that impressive--Barry Sanders has been clocked at 4.37, but Lions fans can remember him getting run down at the end of runs because he just didn't have top speed.

So the 40-yard dash rewards a different kind of speed.

Now, we do have an interesting player comparison that is available to us: Jeffrey Demps, recent Florida player and silver medalist as a part of the 4x100 relay preliminary team this year. He is a shorter runner whose 40 times range from 4.24 to 4.32 depending on how he was clocked; to my knowledge, he did not run in the NFL combine, focusing instead on the Olympic trials. His lifetime best 100 meter time is 10.01, which wouldn't medal but is nothing to sneeze at. I think it's fair to say that while Demps was among the fastest college football players in the country when he played, he wasn't mindblowingly faster than everyone else (even on his own team).

And after roughly 40 yards, he was within a step of the best runners in the U.S. despite running only a 10.27 this year:

So there's that. Demps, a fast college football player, nearly even with the best sprinters in the world.

What does that mean about Denard? Well, I think it means that some of the fastest football players could keep up with Usain Bolt over 40 yards on fieldturf. As Denard himself said, he'd be behind after 60 and in another time zone after 100, but we already knew that.

The only flaw in this argument is that I'm not sure that Denard is quite as fast as we think; I wouldn't be surprised if he clocked in at 4.4 and change at the NFL combine. But then, maybe that's just because I'm used to seeing him run hurt. In that sense, Brian might be right, but only because Denard is only slightly superhumanly fast.

Here's a split of Usain's WR run at Berlin. What's interesting here is that Bolt was ahead of everyone there by 40m and almost everyone at 20m. Dwain Chambers, who was also in the race, is an elite 60m guy as is Tyson Gay. If you take Bolt's 40m time and figure out what that equates to at 40yds, Bolt ran about what Brian wrote, depending on how many decimal points you use for the conversion to meters to ft/yds. And also like Brian mentioned, the sprints differ in that one starts on movement rather than a gun (and the reaction time may be quite a bit more than just a tenth depending on the runner) and the other lets you have blocks, so there's a bunch of assumptions here. 

edit: it shows up squeezed on my screen and is kind of hard to read. Here's a link to the picture: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ua8ycqfc4ok/Sok0X9U62uI/AAAAAAAABq8/HJwymrWaDn4/s1600/Table.gif

Edit 2: Here's another pic of a chart someone made with Usain's previous WR splits versus some other historic performances.