Ever since Noah Lyles stirred up the hornet’s nest by mocking NBA and NFL teams who claim to be “World Champions,” he’s been a target of scorn and derision for many pro sports fans.
For most NBA or NFL athletes and fans, their line of attack was to call him out for being corny or missing the point. After all, the NBA and NFL attract the best in the world in their sports. Their squads would crush foreign basketball and football teams.
Olympian Noah Lyles Has Nothing to Fear in Race vs Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill
Miami Dolphins WR Tyreek Hill went one step further. The man nicknamed “Cheetah,” after all once could accurately describe his speed as world-class. He is faster than most mere mortals and cocky about that speed. So he claimed he could beat Noah Lyles in a race right now.
Ever since he’s challenged Lyles, a raging debate has taken off on the Internet. We’ve all taken the bait.
Burning Questions of Tyreek Hill vs. Noah Lyles
Could Tyreek Hill actually beat Noah Lyles in a race? If so, what distance would the race have to be for Hill to win? Is there a real difference between football speed and track speed?
The truth is most of these discussions, though good-natured, are far too generous to Tyreek Hill. Football players or casual fans, while trying to be respectful to Lyles, are still wildly overestimating either Hill’s speed or Lyles’ slow starts.
Tyreek Hill’s Race Proposals So Far Are Silly
Whether he is, as Noah Lyles suggests, “chasing clout” or is merely a supremely confident person, Tyreek would stand zero chance in a race of any significant length.
First of all, him suggesting a 50-yard race is somewhat laughable. After all, in Track, the outdoor standard race distance is 100 meters. Indoors, short sprinters race 60 meters — a distance at which Noah Lyles won World Indoor Silver and USA Gold this year.
Proposing a 60-meter exhibition during the offseason would be a more serious suggestion. If Tyreek really wanted to game the system, he should suggest a famous distance in football lore.
That would be the 40-yard dash.
Doing the Math to Calculate Noah Lyles 40-Yard Time
There’s no way Lyles would accept that, as he’s calling out Hill’s challenges as gimmicks as it is.
Still, if we lived in a world where he did, the surprising thing is Lyles would still win easily. I have the math to prove it.
This is the biggest misconception about Lyles as he races the fastest men in the world. There is this notion that he is slow at the start. The truth is, he is only marginally slow when compared to the world’s fastest humans.
In the Olympics 100m final, he hit 40 meters in 4.76 seconds. While this put him in eighth place, it was a mere .05 seconds from first. That is not a blowout at all.
So what if you were to convert his speed to 40 yards using his 40-meter split and average speed from the Olympic final? You can land at that number by converting 40 meters to 40 yards and then taking away Lyles’ average speed from 30 to 4o meters. After doing the math, we end up with a 40-yard split of around 4.47 seconds.
That doesn’t seem that fast, right? Most NFL receivers and cornerbacks can hit that number in the Combine every year.
How the NFL Scouting Combine Inflates 40s
The thing is, scouts calculate 40-yard splits on motion, not gun reaction. Lyles’ reaction time to the gun was .178. So that gets subtracted right away. With that adjustment, we are now down to around a 4.29 40-yard time.
Again, that doesn’t seem unbeatable. It’s, in fact, well slower than the NFL Scouting Combine record of 4.21 set by Xavier Worthy this year.
Still, we’re not done yet. 40 times at the Combine, as we noted before, are calculated on the first movement to the naked eye. The average level of error for this is a whopping .25 seconds.
Does that sound crazy? Well it sort of is, but it doesn’t benefit the NFL to adopt fully automatic timing at the start and finish. Would you really want to see 4.50 not be beaten by most of the fastest players in college football?
Projecting and Backing Up Noah Lyles’ Incredibly Fast 40-Yard Time
So now, we are looking at approximately a 4.04 40-yard dash for Noah Lyles after we subtract those .25 seconds. I’ll dial it a bit back with the fact that running on FieldTurf is slower than a track surface. Perhaps that could cause a small difference somewhere in the range of five-hundredths or a tenth of a second.
It’s now easy to see why Christian Coleman could casually run a 4.12 40-yard dash as a collegiate sprinter. Coleman’s personal best at 60 was 6.45 at the time, whereas Lyles has now run 6.43.
This also explains why a retired Usain Bolt hit 4.22 in sweats and sneakers. So, a conservative prediction for Noah Lyles in a 40-yard dash is to run around 4.10 seconds on grass. Track speed and football speed are just different.
Noah Lyles Would Humble Tyreek Hill in Any Race
As for Tyreek, before he bulked up or passed his 31st birthday he used to run 40s in 4.29. Now that he’s 31 and put on muscle, it’s hard to envision him approaching those times. Judging by his start in the 60-meter dash he did run versus a bunch of weekend warriors last year, his block starts aren’t exactly world-class either.
Note how little separation Tyreek gets in the first 10 meters on these amateurs, where supposedly he’d have an edge against Lyles.
So the truth is, Noah Lyles would dust Tyreek Hill comprehensively even in a 40. With that in mind, it is unlikely that we’ll ever see the two race for a couple of reasons.
Tyreek loses nothing by calling out faster people and getting more credit for his speed than he probably deserves. On the football field, he looks insanely fast. That’s enough for most fans.
Do the Miami Dolphins want him risking injury in a race like this? Does he really want to get destroyed by Lyles somewhat like Seattle Seahawks WR D.K. Metcalf was by a bunch of American B-listers in the 100 meters?
Lyles has little to gain from such a matchup, and he is going to have plenty of lower-leverage opportunities to cash in on his celebrity and fame.
If the stars align and it does happen, though, don’t expect much in the way of a contest.
The biggest drama of the exhibition will not be over who wins, but rather when Lyles starts his celebratory taunting. Or how outrageous his celebrations will be.
Main Photo: Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports
