highhoppingworm wrote:
I don’t understand why the football vs track thing comes up so much. The answers are just so obvious to me.
1) There is a small subset of football players, many of whom have track credentials, that could cut it as world class sprinters. None of these athletes would likely be top of the heap, challenging for Olympic medal caliber 100-400 guys.
2) There is a much smaller subset of track athletes that could could cut it as professional football players. None of these athletes would be seeing any time in the NFL and most would max out as an athletic oddity on a practice squad.
3) The era of dual athletes like Bullet Bob Hayes etc. is over given the degree of specialization needed to be successful in each sport. I just don’t see any way that someone could balance the mass and 60m type explosiveness needed to be a professional football player with the moderate amount of speed endurance needed to be. 9.6x-9.7x 100 meter guy.
4) There are no other cross over sports. No, an NBA player can’t just jump into the HJ or LJ. There is enormous data on this to make this statement somewhat definitively. Hell, I was a better HJ in high school than Vince Carter and I was certainly nothing special. No, a soccer player could not jump in and compete in the 400-800 at a world class level.
5) The only reasonable example of crossover in this day and age I could see happening is lineman to shotput. This one seems doable.
As to the source of this thread. Clearly this moron would have no chance at competing with top women. To even consider this is absolutely delusional. He’s a total lard-a$$ and clearly isn’t particularly bright.
Thomas took up high jump in January 2006 while studying at Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri, where he played on the University's basketball team.[4] He tried high jump for the first time when challenged by members of the track and field team, who were reacting to his claims about his ability to slam dunk. Thomas cleared 6'6" (1.98 m) on his first attempt and 7' (2.13 m) on his third ever jump. The athletes then sought the head track coach Lane Lohr, who entered Thomas in a meet two days later at Eastern Illinois University. At the meet he cleared 7'3.25" (2.22 m), on his seventh-ever jump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Thomas_(high_jumper)