Pete Bommarito raises the clipboard he’d been scrawling on for the past hour and gave the announcement everyone was waiting on.
The 17 aspiring NFL players that had just participated in the trainer’s mock combine, simulating their 40-yard dash warm-ups and running it twice — once against the wind and another with the wind to their backs — come running up to hear the numbers they’ve spent weeks training to improve.
A 40-time is a number they’ve obsessed about for years. It generally dictated how hot they were on the high school recruiting circuit, helping to determine what colleges they ended up playing for, and that time will likely impact what round they are selected — if at all — in April’s NFL draft.