How much will Xavier Worthy’s 40-yard dash record influence NFL Draft? Why talent evaluators might care more than you think

Xavier Worthy fired off the tweet from his Indianapolis hotel room at the NFL scouting combine.

“Turn on the film[,] the routes there,” Worthy tweeted at 7:18 a.m. on March 3. “Don’t let that lil 40 mess your head up.”

Turn on the film the routes there don’t let that lil 40 mess your head up

— Z A Y 🖤 (@XavierWorthy) March 3, 2024

The “lil 40” that the Texas Longhorns wide receiver was referencing wasn’t, actually, so little.

Worthy had run a record-breaking 4.21-second 40-yard dash just 13 hours before he unleashed his tweet.

His time wasn’t only the fastest of the 30 receivers at the combine, or even of the 220 total NFL Draft prospects who ran this year. Rather, Worthy clocked the fastest time in NFL combine history, a sample size that includes 5,390 prospects since the league’s database began in 2003 and likely thousands more in the decades prior.

The 5-foot-11, 165-pound Worthy had eyed this record before he set it. No matter that flu-like symptoms and a high ankle sprain truncated his training, or that he’d hovered in the 4.3s during the weeks prior. Worthy still voiced his hope boldly to clubs and media alike during combine interviews.

“Some teams asked me, ‘What do you think you’ll run?’ and I was like, ‘I’m gonna run a 4.2,’” Worthy told Yahoo Sports by phone this week. “They’re like, ‘Oh that’s fast … you know that, right?’ And I was like, ‘I know. I’m gonna be all right. I’m gonna run a 4.2.’”

But after Worthy became the first to come within a tenth-second of his lofty goal, a funny thing happened. He encountered a chorus that viewed his superhuman speed as … a bad thing? Worthy knew straight-line speed alone doesn’t make an NFL player. But he wondered: Does my tape no longer count?

Cue the 7:18 a.m. tweet.

“I feel like before the combine, if I would have run something like a 4.3, they would have been like, ‘Oh, he’s a route runner’ — but now that I run a 4.2, it’s like, ‘He’s…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/how-much-will-xavier-worthys-40-yard-dash-record-influence-nfl-draft-why-talent-evaluators-might-care-more-than-you-think-181534250.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-04-16 18:15:34

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