Breaking News: The NFL's Robots Are Not to be Trusted.

Shortly after the NFL announced Robert Griffin III's official 40 time at the NFL Combine on Sunday morning, RG3 claimed that he was first told that an official time of 4.35 on the field before it was corrected and believes that he ran faster than the reported 4.41.

Let's get something out of the way: 4.41 in the 40 is ridiculously fast. Space alien fast. That human beings can travel so quickly without the aid of mechanical devices of any kind impresses the hell out of me. That there is an entire sporting league made up of dozens of such people actually boggles my mind. I might be able to cross that distance that quickly if you shot me out of a cannon. Maybe.

Still, as RG3 said in the article I linked above, you want the time to be right. I know with these newfangled computers and electronic timing devices, accuracy is the key, and their accuracy is generally considered to be better than even the most experienced hand timers simply because human reaction time requires information to go from the eye to the brain, be processed, and then be transmitted to the hand to depress a button on a stopwatch. At least that's what they require now, I'm considering filing a patent application for a yet-to-be designed device that operates purely by thought. Why would I waste such technology, assuming I had it, on timing football players? ... That's actually not a bad question.

Anyway, knowing as I know that electronic timers are probably more reliable than oh-so-fallible humans, when Mike Florio of ProFootballTimes (NBC Sports) tells me that every hand timer in attendance clocked RG3 between 4.33 (Michael Vick's record for a QB) and 4.38, I will freely put aside any faith I have in robotic contraptions and declare that these times are what really happened. I didn't buy green and gold blinders to not use them, after all.

So, from now on here at ODB, I'm going to consider RG3's official* time to be somewhere between 4.33 and 4.38. We'll go ahead and split the difference and then round down to say 4.35 like RG3 was told on the field. I also choose to believe that the so-called "official" timing devices used by the NFL fabricated a higher time for Griffin because they are incredibly passive-aggressive creatures and can't violate the First Law of Robotics.