☕️ S&C Daily — He's Strong Enough

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Each summer Bruce Feldman ranks college football’s most freakishly athletic players, built on testing numbers he collects from strength coaches, trainers and NFL scouts. He’s done it since 2005. This year’s list runs 101 deep, and one number turns up in the majority of entries: GPS top speed.

The bar has moved. 22 miles per hour is routine, 23 shows up over and over, and Oregon linebacker Devon Jackson hit 24, which Feldman says is the fastest The Athletic has ever heard from a college player. Coaches are the ones running the GPS, so it’s their number.

The other pattern is where freaks come from. More than two dozen entries are former throwers, sprinters or state champion wrestlers - Miami’s Jackson Cantwell was a national record shot putter, Florida’s Jayden Woods won Kansas 6A in shot and discus, Iowa’s Kade Pieper was a Nebraska state shot put champ, and Oregon State’s Daniel Matagi and Houston’s Shadre Hurst were both state title wrestlers.

Two staffs also volunteered that they’ve stopped letting their strongest lineman go heavier. Oregon capped A’Mauri Washington after a 765 squat and an 855 Hatfield double. “He can probably squat more than we’re even putting on the bar,” Dan Lanning said. “He’s strong enough.”

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Kansas took in more than thirty transfers this offseason. Normally a strength staff spends the first couple weeks of training working out who those guys actually are. “You’re two weeks into training, you’re learning these things about these guys,” director of sports performance Matt Gildersleeve told KU Sports.

So he moved all of it in front of the first lift. Every transfer got screened by the strength and training staff, then medically, then sat down with Gildersleeve for thirty minutes on his goals and what drives him. Then Gildersleeve called the strength coach at the player’s old school. He says it saved three or four weeks of training. “I would do it tenfold over again.”

In a recent VALD piece, physical therapist and strength coach Dylan Carmody argues a return-to-play number means nothing without the right thing to compare it against. Limb symmetry is the trap. After ACL reconstruction the healthy leg loses strength too, six to twelve months out, so the gap between legs closes while both are still weak. The familiar 10% cutoff is shakier than it looks as well, since pass rates move depending on which test you run it on.

Pre-injury numbers have their own catch. Preseason testing often catches an athlete who is already deconditioned, so matching that old baseline is not the same as being ready. Carmody’s read is that players coming back need a surplus over their pre-injury numbers, not a match.

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