the guy is fast and the bottom line is he smoked everybody regardless of what the actual clock said the times were.

This is exactly the point I was trying to make — he’s faster than everyone he competed against. It’s the second a PSU fan genuinely thinks that this kid is 0.12 seconds faster than Justin King over 40 yards, or faster than King at all, that he enters the pseudo-science fantasy land of fake 40 times.

its the outliers so to speak where the differences lie

It’s possible, I don’t know what the distribution looks like. But it sounds farfetched, that there is this magical point in the bell curve where certain genes in some people activate to drop their 100m time by 0.3 seconds. An alternative viewpoint is that the outliers are the easiest to see because they are clearly in the public’s eye every Sunday on CBS. Calculating what an “average white guy” runs is a hell of a lot more work, and as far as I know the government isn’t dropping millions of dollars to pull people off the street and run 40’s.

Personally, I think that 10 second barrier you mention for white sprinters has been by far the most damning piece of evidence in terms of a observable racial difference in physical ability, because pretty much everybody who is fast in high school ends up running the 100m at some point. As for people like Jimmy the Greek, he has no business espousing an academic hypothesis — existing evidence is inconclusive and mostly anecdotal — as an NFL color commentator. He deserved to be fired because his very public opinion can create sweeping stereotypes that discourage all young white athletes across the country to even try, or suggest young black men focus on athletics rather than the piano or higher-order mathematics. An opinion of this sort belongs in a refereed paper with a ton of well-measured evidence and with heavy disclaimers on drawing unfair and damaging conclusions.

If you want to read a progressive opinion on race and the NFL, written by Drew Magary of all people, check out the Dick Joke Jambaroo from Week 3. It highlights a possible way in which a physical advantage for a quarterback is actually detrimental to his long-term success.

And it really is a very thin line to walk when making hypotheses about such disparity.

One factor I would consider is background. The hometown I grew up in was very rural and blue collar. The graduating class at the high school was maybe 130. The football team wasn’t always the biggest, but the players were typically tougher, stronger, meaner, and even faster than their competition. Which included teams from more urban areas once the playoffs started. At PSU, our flag football team won the major division championship every year. I don’t want to sound like Al Bundy or anything and brag about it, but I think it counts for something at such a large university. We also won the softball championship every year and nearly won the bball one every year as well. And we were all white. We just didn’t grow up in an environment where athletics was simply just an after-school activity to fill time. Athletics were everything, and had been a big part of the areas culture for decades. Our rival produced Jim Kelly (then we absorbed their school district, but that’s another story). When I moved during high school, the school district I went to was larger and more affluent, yet the football team was awful. My new friends were apathetic to performing well in sports and it translated into less talent on the field.

I simply think that when a boy grows up in an environment where the most obvious opportunity for advancement is athletics and the culture around him encourages him to attack that opportunity, they’re more inclined to succeed in that field…just as a kid who grows up with two doctors as parents is more likely to be a successful professional.

There are always exceptions to everything, of course, but I just think that the cultural differences, irrespective of skin color, really influences a person’s performance on an athletic field.

since the site is down, but Malcolm Gladwell (www.gladwell.com if you don’t know about him, he is a good writer from the New Yorker, and writes in a way that makes you start to believe one thing, then switches it up and makes you believe something else, and he is pretty good at least at looking at scientific studies) wrote about this subject a while ago. He even went so far as to compare west vs east Africans (notice how Kenyans almost always dominate in the marathons, while people from say Nigeria are typically better sprinters).

I don’t recall the exact “conclusion” but I think it was something along the lines of distribution of talents (because as you note, the average white guy and the average black guy are VERY similar). If I remember to check later when the site is back up I’ll try to find the exact article.