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NFL

40-yard dash tests more than just speed

The 40-yard dash is a moneymaker. Post a great time in Indianapolis? Well, a 4.4 40 buys you a ticket to The Show.

I knew it way back in 2000 when I ran at the combine. Every defensive back does. Same with the wide receivers. Heck, even the big boys on the offensive and defensive lines want to test well. Speed sells in the NFL.

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But these young cats running this week in Indianapolis aren’t in the perfect environment to light up the track inside Lucas Oil Stadium. Nope. By the time you put your hand in the ground and drop into a sprinter’s stance, you’re worn down. Days of interviews, medical testing (with doctors and trainers raking on your knees, shoulders, etc.), written exams, the bench test, late-night meetings with scouts, early-morning wake-up calls for drug testing … man, that beats you up. And you don’t run or do any positional drills until the final day at the combine.

But hey, that’s exactly what the league wants, right? And I get it. This isn’t a pro day on campus where you get to dress in your own locker room and run on your own track. Those things are layups compared to the grind of the combine.

The 40-yard dash is the ultimate test at the combine. Joe Robbins/Getty Images

Here in Indianapolis, these pro clubs want to see how you perform in an adverse situation. You should be worn down given the enormity of this event. Your body tightens up, you don’t sleep much and all you can think about is that 40-yard dash. I know I did from the minute my plane landed.

But despite all that, teams want to know: Can you showcase your athletic ability when the environment isn’t ideal? That’s exactly what being an NFL player is all about.

The track has changed since I ran back at the old RCA Dome. That was real turf, the old-school stuff, and it had a little bounce to it. Some of the top guys didn’t even bother running the 40. But a guy like me? A late-round defensive back? Yeah, I was going to run. No doubt. I even tried to sneak some track spikes out there until a scout looked down and told me there was no chance I was wearing those shoes. Take them off, son. Nice try.

So I settled for a pair of track flats. Lightweight speed shoes. At least, that’s what I told myself while warming up. And then I spent five minutes trying to rig up the oversized, heavyweight combine T-shirt I was issued. It went well with the 1980s Larry Bird-style shorts they handed out. Gross.

The sweet Under Armour gear the guys wear now? The shirts with heart-rate monitors built in or something? Nah, we didn’t have that stuff.

Tie up your T-shirt and go. That was it for us. I broke 4.5 — barely (4.49).

“Your body tightens up, you don’t sleep much and all you can think about is that 40-yard dash. I know I did from the minute my plane landed.”

The track inside Lucas Oil Stadium now is pretty clean. Honestly, it makes me question any healthy prospect who decides not to run here. It’s a fast track. With FieldTurf and prospects wearing cleats, you can get a good start and bust out some serious times. We will see that over the weekend and into Monday when those wide receivers and defensive backs toe the line.

But while most of our focus is on the 40-yard dash, we can’t forget about the change-of-direction testing, the vertical jump and the positional drills that expose all of your weaknesses. Tight? Stiff? Inflexible? Then it will show in the short-shuttle and three-cone drills, and when you are asked to open your hips or work laterally in position drills.

The point? You can’t hide at the combine. I took a bath in some of those defensive back drills. I really did. That wasn’t my gig as a player, and it showed.

That’s why I still value the athletic testing at the combine. No, it doesn’t tell us whether a prospect can play at a high level in the pros, nor does it show us how tough or physical a guy is. And a 4.4 40 doesn’t mean much if a prospect has sloppy technique on his college game film. I’ll take a safety with 4.6 speed any day if he can tackle, create range over the top and display the proper angle to finish a play. That’s football.

But the combine is just another part of the grading process. And the various tests, culminating with the 40, leave players exhausted. I mean, it felt as if I had just played a game. My hamstrings were locked up, my back was tight. The combine will break down even the toughest guys in this year’s draft class. Which is exactly the point.

ESPN.com NFL analyst Matt Bowen played seven seasons as a defensive back in the NFL.

NFL

McCaffrey: Skipping bowl was 'career decision'

INDIANAPOLIS — Stanford running back Christian McCaffrey said that many of the NFL’s decision makers have asked him about skipping the Sun Bowl to begin his preparations for the NFL draft and that he told them it was a “career decision.”

McCaffrey and LSU running back Leonard Fournette, two high-profile players in this draft class, each decided to forgo their team’s final game. Fournette did not play in the Citrus Bowl.

Thursday was McCaffrey’s first time publicly discussing the decision other than a brief announcement on Twitter in December.

McCaffrey has already met with many teams at the NFL scouting combine, including his hometown Broncos, and said several of the league talent evaluators had asked him about his decision not to play against North Carolina.

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“I just tell them how it is. When they ask, I’m extremely honest with them, and then we move on to now and playing football,” McCaffrey said Thursday. “I just know I made that decision, it’s a career decision, it was a man decision, to try to protect my dream of playing and succeeding in the NFL. And whether it gave me an advantage or not, I stuck with it and I’m here now moving on.”

After several more questions about the decision, McCaffrey said he’s likely done talking about it.

“That’s probably all I’ll talk about that anymore,” he said. “I’m moving on to NFL football now.”

McCaffrey said he told Stanford coach David Shaw of his decision to skip the game in December and received a standing ovation from his teammates when he informed them.

“My teammates … every single one of them supported me, had my back,” McCaffrey said. “They gave me a little ovation, and I got a lot of love from my teammates. It was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I was just happy to have a lot of guys who had my back then.”

Christian McCaffrey understands he’ll be asked about skipping the Sun Bowl to prepare for the NFL draft. “It was a man decision to try to protect my dream of playing and succeeding in the NFL,” he said. Jennifer Buchanan/USA TODAY Sports

NFL teams will likely ask the same of McCaffrey during their pre-draft questioning. San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch, a Stanford graduate, said he understood the decision and didn’t question it, but he said “some people will” in the pre-draft process.

Broncos executive vice president of football operations/general manager John Elway, another Stanford graduate, said he actually changed his mind about McCaffrey’s decision after hearing about it initially.

“I understand it now,” Elway said at the combine. “When I thought about it, kind of the old-school in me wanted to come out saying, ‘Why would those guys not play? It’s their last game,’ this and that. But I tell you what, when you look at where the league is now and talk about the value of these contracts and these players coming out and the risk they’re taking, the old salty guy in me got flipped back to understanding.”

McCaffrey gained 3,864 yards in 2015, breaking Barry Sanders’ single-season record for all-purpose yardage. During the 2016 season, he suffered what he called a bruised hip and still led the nation with 2,327 all-purpose yards, including 1,603 rushing yards.

He said he has told teams he believes he can be an “every-down back.” He’s also said that when he lines wide in the formation, “I can be a receiver” as well as a team’s full-time returner.

When it came time for him to perform at the combine, McCaffrey excelled in most of the areas he participated in.

Christian McCaffrey didn’t fare well on the bench press, however, managing 10 repetitions of the 225-pound test.

That’s about half of what running backs usually average at the annual gathering and it immediately set social media abuzz over the 2015 Heisman Trophy runner-up’s upper body strength.

The star running back, however, made up for that poor performance by running a 4.48 in the 40-yard dash, ahead of LSU’s Leonard Fournette, who ran a 4.51.

McCaffrey also had a terrific vertical jump of 37+ inches, which was 9 inches more than Fournette’s 28+-inch jump.

Of the 33 running backs at the league’s annual combine, only Tennessee’s Alvin Kamara jumped farther, at 39+ inches, and UTEP’s Aaron Joseph equaled McCaffrey’s result.

McCaffrey did well in the broad jump, too, at a respectable 10 feet, 1 inch.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

NFL

49ers GM is OK with Kaepernick opting out

One way or another, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was going to become a free agent this offseason.

Kaepernick’s representatives informed teams earlier this week that he would be opting out of the final year of his contract with the 49ers. The paperwork was finalized and filed Friday, sources told ESPN’s Adam Caplan. Kaepernick, who restructured his contract last October, will become an unrestricted free agent when the new league year begins next Thursday.

But even if Kaepernick hadn’t exercised that option, he wouldn’t have been back with the 49ers under the terms of his current contract. General manager John Lynch told SiriusXM radio on Thursday afternoon that the team would have released Kaepernick had he not elected to opt out.

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“Kaep is going to opt out,” Lynch said. “We had a great conversation with him. We had a great meeting, and I think we had a very frank and honest discussion, and what we both agreed was that under the current construct of the situation, everything, the contract, it wasn’t going to work.”

The Niners aren’t ruling out a reunion with Kaepernick — “We left that door open in a very real and positive way,” Lynch said Thursday at the NFL combine — because San Francisco will have no quarterbacks under contract for 2017 at the start of the new league year.

A former second-round pick in 2011, Kaepernick had the fifth-best touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio (14 to 3) among all starting quarterbacks during the second half of last season. Kaepernick, who’s had three surgeries, is back up to between 225 and 230 pounds. His weight was a subject of interest from personnel executives last season.

Kaepernick joins Blaine Gabbert, Christian Ponder and Thad Lewis as 49ers quarterbacks set to explore the free-agent market. Because of that, Lynch and coach Kyle Shanahan acknowledge that finding help for the game’s most important position is the top priority.

“We are looking at every option,” Lynch told Sirius. “We need to. Free agency, there’s some viable options there. I’m excited about this draft class. I think a lot of people have criticized these guys. As I watch them, I get excited. I think with the No. 2 pick in the draft, that’s a valuable asset, and it gives us a lot of options at our disposal. One thing Kyle and I have talked about: When you have no quarterbacks, it’s not an ideal situation, but what it does, it allows us to go get people.

“Obviously there’s constraints, but it allows us to form it in the way we want. We aren’t taking other people’s stuff that maybe we aren’t thrilled about. We can go say, ‘Hey, these are the guys we want to play with.'”

One option is pursuing Washington Redskins quarterback Kirk Cousins. Washington placed the exclusive franchise tag on Cousins this week, effectively denying him the opportunity to even negotiate with other teams. That means that if the Redskins decide to part with Cousins, it will come via trade — and with a presumably hefty price.

Lynch said Thursday he has not had any discussions with the Redskins about Cousins, but he did say he has great respect for the veteran and reiterated, “All options are available to us.”

Earlier on Thursday, Lynch spoke highly of some of the top quarterbacks in this year’s draft class. The Niners interviewed Notre Dame’s DeShone Kizer on Wednesday night at the combine in Indianapolis, and Lynch said Kizer “blew the doors off” the room with an impressive performance.

Lynch also had positive things to say about what he’s seen from the likes of Clemson’s Deshaun Watson, North Carolina’s Mitch Trubisky and Texas Tech’s Pat Mahomes.

During his media session at the scouting combine on Wednesday, Shanahan said he hadn’t yet had a chance to dive into the top of the college prospects, but he offered some insight into what he’s looking for at quarterback.

“Really, how quick they process things,” Shanahan said. “You can tell [by] talking to people who’s capable of processing a lot, but the smartest people aren’t always the best quarterbacks either. You can overprocess things. So, it’s how quick they react in the pocket. Do they watch the rush? Are they fearless? If they’re watching the rush at all and things like that, it’s very hard to make the reactions you need to make in this league with how quick these windows close.

“So you want to see how quick their decision-making is. Not on the board, but in the pocket when they’re under duress.”

No matter the avenue, the Niners will add multiple quarterbacks over the next couple of months. It’s just a matter of how they go about doing it.

“We understand how critical that position is,” Lynch told Sirius, “and sometimes you have to be bold to secure a guy that you think is a franchise guy. And we’re both willing to do that, and there’s a number of different ways that we can and we’re exploring all those options right now.”

NFL

Aaron Rodgers at 39? Mike McCarthy sees a Tom Brady-like performance

INDIANAPOLIS — Tom Brady led the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl at age 39. Mike McCarthy believes Aaron Rodgers, 33, could do the same thing for the Green Bay Packers.

“I wouldn’t be surprised by it, with some good fortune,” McCarthy, the Packers’ coach, said during an interview at the NFL scouting combine. “As far as the conditioning and the level of conditioning from the guy, it’s off the charts.”

Brady played at an MVP-contending level — and more importantly at a championship level — last season, and McCarthy sees little that could prevent Rodgers from doing the same thing at that age.

“A lot goes into that; only the good Lord knows the answer to that,” McCarthy told. “But genetically, he definitely has those gifts.”

The way Packers coach Mike McCarthy sees it, Aaron Rodgers is nowhere close to the beginning of a decline at age 33. Al Tielemans via AP Images

It has been six years since the Packers’ most recent Super Bowl appearance, when Rodgers was the MVP in the win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. But they’ve been back in the NFC Championship Game twice since — the 2014 overtime loss at Seattle and the blowout loss at Atlanta this past season.

That loss further raised the ire of those who think the Packers have wasted Rodgers’ prime by not getting to a second Super Bowl. But given McCarthy’s belief that Rodgers could do what Brady has done at his age, it would indicate that the coach thinks his quarterback is nowhere close to the beginning of a decline.

“Players reach their prime at certain stages, and I think there’s no question Aaron’s in his prime right now,” McCarthy said. “You definitely want to maximize that, but he is one of 53 and plays the most important position and makes a huge impact. I get all that.”

Rodgers got off to a slow start last season that had people around the league diagnosing what was wrong with the two-time NFL MVP.

“You had the middle stretch from Game 4 through probably [Game] 8 where we had a lot of challenges, but he played pretty damn good in that stretch, too,” McCarthy said. “We were going through an adjustment. We were running the ball early, Jordy [Nelson] was just getting back into things, and then we lose Eddie [Lacy]. We had a lot of things that were in flux.

“And then his numbers just went through the roof.”

Rodgers’ play during the Packers’ eight-game winning streak leading up to the game against the Falcons included 21 touchdowns and just one interception. His passer rating of 117.9 was second to only NFL MVP Matt Ryan (121.6) during that stretch.

Rodgers has begun to think about his longevity. He said it was one of the reasons he changed his diet last offseason. (Remember when he gave up cheese?) McCarthy said Rodgers is in the best shape of his career and remains dedicated to maintaining that.

“I can’t remember the last time he hasn’t been at a workout in the offseason,” McCarthy said.

Rodgers has been dogged by a few nagging muscle injuries (hamstring and calf strains) but played — and played well — through them and otherwise has been healthy since the broken collarbone of 2013, which was the last time he missed a game.

It was after the NFC title game when Rodgers said he did not feel like his age would become a factor anytime soon.

“I don’t; I still feel pretty young,” Rodgers said at the time. “I think I have a number of years left in me [where] I can play at a high level.”

What followed was his “all-in” remark that most took as a plea for general manager Ted Thompson to be more active in building a championship team. Thompson, for his part, said he didn’t interpret it that way, and McCarthy said he didn’t think there was any “hidden message” in Rodgers’ comment.

“I think it’s a statement of leadership,” McCarthy said. “He’s definitely at the point in his career where he knows how hard it is to get these opportunities, and I’m getting longer in the tooth, too. You only get so many attempts at the plate, and we all want to maximize it and we all have a responsibility to the organization to maximize these opportunities.”

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