More Speed Commentary…

…this time from ESPN’s Bruce Feldman, who gives his three cents on the SEC speed discussion.

This morning, while reading the HP site, something struck me: I wonder what makes us perceive a team as “fast”?

A team of guys who also star on the track team?

A bunch of linebackers who reportedly run sub-4.6?

One shining example of a player who is by far the fastest at his position?

A highlight of a non-descript player running down a supposed speedster in the open-field?

This is a great point brought up by Bruce. What do we mean when we say a team is fast? Are we talking the aggregate 40 times for the entire roster? Skill guys? This is why I dislike using the term ‘speed’ as some sort of catch-all. In many cases, you just can’t quantify it.

If pressed to say the fastest team in the country, my first two thoughts are LSU and Florida. Of course I say LSU because of Trindon Holliday and I’m sure there’s some Big Ten fan who will remind me that the Tigers best linebacker last year Ali Highsmith barely cracked 5.0 at the combine in the 40. I say UF because of Percy Harvin, Chris Rainey and Carlos Dunlap, and then I remember back to seeing the Gators in person in Oxford and thinking about how slow Ole Miss WR Mike Wallace made their secondary look.

I agree with Bruce that Florida is probably the fastest team in the country, with USC right there, too, perhaps. But as he points out, every team has its guys who can’t run. Sometimes the matchups exploit those particular discrepancies and, even though the team getting exploited is the one that is faster overall, it’s just not fast enough in a key area.

In the end, overall roster speed is something that we can’t really prove, we can only sense it. I do think coaches can at times use speed, or lack of it, as an excuse for poor performance on their own parts.  Good coaching and good systems can make decently fast guys (like Steve Slaton) appear really fast.   Get a guy in space and on turf with his shoulders squared to the end zone and it’s amazing how swift he can look.  Conversely, there are some programs where you don’t find out how fast a guy really is until he gets to the league because he’s been grinding it out in a phone booth for the past three or four years.

Is the SEC a fast league? For sure. It has the best collection of athletes in the country, without a doubt. But claiming the outcome of one game between two elite programs–say Florida beating Ohio State–is due to a singular attribute like ‘speed’ is, I think, misguided.