NFL Defensive linemen

Athletes are getting stronger and faster. Every year, new classes of freakish athletes are joining college and professional teams. I’m going to talk about the rookies entering the NFL Draft, these young men, showing off their abilities at the NFL Combine, are insanely athletic and ridiculously massive. The certain group I’m going to focus on is the incoming defensive linemen. These guys are insane! As the years go on, athletes are getting better and better, but this is very noticeable with the defensive line men at the NFL Combine.

After watching the combine today and noticing some of these monsters were faster than some running backs and wide receivers, I took to the internet to research this spectacle. What I found on bleacherreport.com was astonishing. What I found was that a defensive lineman at the combine, from Oklahoma University, Charles Tapper, ran an official 4.59 second forty yard dash! Tapper outran six running backs and twelve wide receivers who were also participating in this year’s combine. At 6'2" and 276 pounds, Tapper is a paradigm of the new hybrid athlete in this world, called an NFL defensive lineman.

These guys aren’t necessarily getting that much faster  per the 40 yard dash compared to ten years ago, but they are getting up to full speed at a crazy 1.6 seconds, they have already ran ten yards and are at top speed before this mark at ten yards.  These defensive hogs are however, getting much bigger and stronger. There are NFL hopeful defensive linemen at 6’7” and over 300 pounds who run their forty’s in less than five seconds. But all of these freak athletes are pretty much expected to rep 225 pounds on bench press at least twenty five times to even be considered draftable. They are expected to be as fast as skills players and be about ten 225 pound bench press reps stronger. They are also matching running back and wide receiver times for the three cone drill, which combines agility with burst speed.

It just seems insane to me that an athlete that is over a hundred pounds heavier than the athlete next to him can match the lighter athletes speed and agility. With new defensive schemes that are allowing coaches to utilize these freakish athlete’s abilities, defensive linemen are getting stronger and faster every year. They are becoming more and more valuable to NFL teams. These guys are really a wild show to watch. Seeing them terrorize quarterbacks and stuff runs up the middle, it’s no wonder they are getting paid tens of millions of dollars.