Sub-4.5 Combine 40 Times by WRs from West Since 2000

Among the positions participating in the 40-yard dash at each NFL Combine, the wide receivers tend to be faster across the board.

That generally seemed to be the case again this year.

But how did the 2025 participants from schools in the West compare to other Combine classes in the region dating back to  2000?

To find out, we updated our historical 40-yard dash results, extracted the wide receivers, and selected those who ran a sub-4.5, as listed in the table below.

But before we get to the rankings, it’s worth exploring how the NFL’s 40-yard dash came to be used by scouts to evaluate a player’s speed and acceleration.

According to Michael MacCambridge in America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, 40 yards is the average distance of a punt, and it takes 4.5 seconds to reach that distance, as determined by Paul Brown in the mid-1940s.

Theoretically, if a player can run 40 yards in 4.5 seconds, he could reach the point where a punted ball comes down as it arrives.

Here’s the 40-yard dash time for every wide receiver from the West who has run a sub-4.5 at the NFL Combine since 2000, along with their school and the year they participated, collected in a searchable, sortable table.

(Since the Combine wasn’t held in 2021 due to the pandemic, we’ve included the team Pr0-Day drill results for that year instead).

Washington’s John Ross still owns the fastest 40-yard dash time among players from schools in the West at 4.22, as well as the second-fastest all-time nationwide.

Washington State’s Kyle Williams recorded the fastest time in 2025 at 4.4.