Measurement · August 2026

The 4.5 forty is marketing. Here is every measured college population.

The most repeated number in youth football is a time almost no college player has ever run under laboratory conditions. Before your family spends another season chasing it, look at what has actually been measured.

Where the 4.5 comes from

The 40 times everyone quotes trace back to the NFL Combine - a few hundred athletes a year who are, by definition, the fastest tier of the draft pool. One published analysis covers 2,894 combine athletes across 2000-2018 (Frank et al., 2023). Those are professional prospects. They are not college football, and they are certainly not high school football.

There is a second problem: the combine 40 is hand-started and electronically finished. That hybrid start is part of why combine times read fast. A fully automatic clock, the kind used in published research, starts on movement and adds real time to the same run.

What measured college populations actually run

Read that table carefully and the story is consistent: measured junior-college skill players - fast, real, college athletes - average 4.89 on lasers. Measured high schoolers who care enough to attend a combine average 5.3. The gap between what is measured and what is quoted is close to three quarters of a second, which in 40-yard terms is a different sport.

Your stopwatch is adding to the confusion

The same 2015 study measured how hand timing compares to the automatic clock: experienced timers ran 0.22 ± 0.07 seconds fast, novices 0.26 ± 0.08. A dad-timed 4.58 is an electronic 4.80. This is not cheating and it is not bad stopwatches - it is human reaction at the start beep. But it means a hand time and a laser time are different measurements wearing the same name, and comparing one to the other flatters everybody by about two tenths.

Why nobody tells you this

Because almost every published 40 chart is a target, not a measurement. Recruiting services publish what coaches supposedly want to see. Camps publish times that fill camps. The combine numbers circulate because they are the only widely known dataset, even though they describe the top of the professional funnel. Nobody is selling 5.12.

We will be straight about our own glass house: most published football benchmarks anywhere, including the ladders our engine scores against, trace their ancestry to combine-style data, because position-by-position D1 testing has never been published. That is exactly why our tables label every value as a rung on our ladder and never as a measured average - and why, where a real measured figure exists, we use it and say so. A benchmark can be honest about what it is. A "D1 average" that nobody measured cannot.

What a family should actually do

Stop comparing across clocks. If the time was hand-caught, compare it to hand-caught standards, or subtract nothing and add the honest 0.22 to any electronic chart. Track the gap, not the cutoff - a 40 that moves from 5.3 to 5.1 on the same clock is real progress no matter what a poster says. And treat any chart that does not state its timing method as marketing until proven otherwise.

Sources: Mann, J.B. et al., Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2015 (n=81 NCAA D1, fully automatic timing; hand-timing offsets from the same paper). Lockie, R.G. et al., Sports 4(3):41, 2016, open access (n=62 JUCO, laser). Gillen, Z.M. et al., International Journal of Exercise Science, 2019 (n=7,214 HS, Zybek laser). Frank et al., 2023 (n=2,894 NFL Combine 2000-2018). Population sizes and timing methods stated because a number without its method is not a measurement.