Size vs. Speed in the NFL combine

While the NFL boasts some amazing athletes that seem to defy the law of physics, they cannot escape them completely.  Newton’s second law of motion states that acceleration is proportional to force and inversely related to mass.  Simply put, this means that a heavy player must apply a greater amount of force to achieve the same acceleration as a slimmer wide-receiver.   To illustrate this trend, we might plot the average speed (120 ft/dash_time) of defensive combine participants against their weight.

This graphic was restricted to defensive positions as straight-line speed is likely to be more important than the so-called "skill positions" of offense or the massive men in the offensive line.  Still, by the clustering, we can see that the various types of positions tend to fall in the same size/speed range, so we might break this down by position in a subsequent post.

Indeed, a similar plot for "skill positions" exhibits more spread though we still have some clustering by position.

And we'll include a similar plot for offensive linemen, for the sake of completeness: