Last year, edge rushers Marcus Davenport (14th overall pick by the Saints) and Lorenzo Carter (66th pick by the Giants) ran the top weight-adjusted times in the 40-yard dash.  For perspective, Davenport weighed in at 264 and ran a 4.58, while Carter was 450 pounds and ran a 4.50.  Based on the best-fit formula from the 2018 combine, every 5 additional pounds of player weight corresponded to taking about 3 hundredths of a second longer to run the 40, so Davenport and Carter essentially tied for having the best time in the race.

This year, there was no tie.  In fact, it wasn’t particularly close, as Mississippi State edge rusher Montez Sweat weighted 260 pounds but ran a 4.41!

PFR has 40-yard dash times at the NFL combine going back to 2000. Over that time period, there have been a number of players who have run the race in 4.45 or fewer seconds at a decent weight, and a number of players at 250 pounds or heavier who ran a sub 4.70 40. But being both heavy and lightning fast is pretty unusual. In fact, Sweat and Vernon Davis (2006, 254, 4.38) really stand out in this regard.

The graph below shows the heavy guys who ran fast times, and the fast guys who weren’t super skinny, going back to 2000.  The X-Axis shows weight, and the Y-Axis shows 40 time, in reverse order.  You want to be up and to the right, and Davis and Sweat (both colored in red) stand out the most in that regard.  The top left is all the super fast players, and the bottom right is all the heavy athletes, but it’s the rare athlete who could hang out in either group.  Davis and Sweat are those rare athletes.

By comparison, widely acknowledged freak athlete Jadeveon Clowney ran the 40 in 4.53 seconds at 266 pounds.  It’s not too hard to find Clowney in the graph above; and shaded a bit higher than him are two other defensive ends: Dwight Freeney (2002, 4.48, 266) and Bryan Thomas (2002, 4.47, 266). Clowney was a freak, and Freeney and Thomas ran even more remarkable races than them…. and Sweat did even freakier stuff than both of them!

I looked at every player in PFR’s database from ’00 to ’19 who weighed between 215 and 290 pounds and was listed as either an edge rusher, DE, or OLB. Below is the 40-yard dash time for each of those players (on the Y-Axis) and their weight (on the X-Axis). Montez Sweat is in red.

I looked at this subset of players — defensive ends and linebackers since 2000 at under 290 pounds — and ran a regression using just one input and one output: weight and 40-yard time. The best-fit formula to project the 40-yard dash for this group was to assume every player would run the 40 in 4.572 seconds plus 0.00458 seconds for every pound of weight over 215 pounds. So for Sweat, at 260 pounds, we would project a 4.78 time. Since he actually ran it in 4.41 seconds, he finished with a 40-time that was +0.37 seconds over expectation. Among this group, that is the most impressive, well, ever.

And so it should be no surprise that Sweat will be likely taken in the first round — perhaps very early — of the 2019 Draft.