KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The best college football athletes in the world convened in Indianapolis for the past week, where the NFL Scouting Combine put them through a series of tests designed to direct their futures.

Over four days, one of the most impressive feats came when a guy clocked the 157th fastest 40-yard dash.

Why? Well, that player just so happens to weigh 332 pounds.

Missouri offensive tackle Armand Membou completed the 40 in 4.91 seconds, the fastest time for a lineman who is at least 6-foot-4 and 330 pounds since 2003, per Next Gen Stats.

Membou reached 20.28 miles per hour on the sprint. The purpose of this next sentence isn’t intended to single anyone out, but there’s just no way around it: Kareem Hunt has never reached 20 miles per hour on a rushing play in his entire career.

I don’t mean just last season, when he was a 29-year-old running back in Kansas City. I mean he’s never hit 20 mph in a game. Neither has quarterback Patrick Mahomes, by the way.

Membou, all 332 pounds of him, was moving. It was remarkable.

But you might have a pretty valid follow-up question: Does it even matter?

Membou is a tackle, after all. When is he going to need to outrun a defense? You’re explicitly hoping he never touches a football. So does it really matter how fast he runs?

In a word: Yes.

In two: A lot.

A year ago, Sumer Sports studied the relationship between all of the scouting combine testing and NFL playing time, and separately but often relatedly, the relationship between the scouting combine testing and draft position.

There is one metric that clearly correlated most with a tackle’s scouting combine performance and his playing time and draft value. You know what I’m going to say.

It’s the 40-yard dash.

Membou, in other words, didn’t simply provide a cool highlight clip that will generate some buzz for a day. He likely significantly changed his future.

There’s a reason for the connection, even if teams don’t typically request their tackles to win foot-races during a game.

It’s not a perfect link, granted, but tackles who run well often have quicker “get-off” with their pass sets. As a reminder for how important that get-off is, well, remember there’s a motive for why Chiefs right tackle Jawaan Taylor is so frequently looking for a head start off the snap. And Taylor is far from the only one.

The speedier tackles can theoretically bend their bodies more easily, which aids their lower body explosion. That helps too. And, sure, the speed can be a factor on those occasions when you do ask them to play in a little more space, such as pulling on a run play or serving as a lead blocker in the screen game.

But here’s what teams now consider confirmed: Membou has the size to pass protect and the ability to get off the line of scrimmage and drop into that pass set quicker than most.

After his junior season ended with Mizzou, Membou was projected by many as a day two pick, according to Grinding The Mocks tracking data. In the span of 4.91 seconds Sunday, he all but sealed his fate as a first-round pick. (In the process, he almost certainly took himself out of play for the Chiefs at No. 31 overall.) PFF’s new mock draft released Monday morning projects Membou going fifth overall to the Jacksonville Jaguars. That’s some kind of surge.

Only Georgia’s Jared Wilson ran a faster 40 (4.84 seconds) than Membou among all offensive linemen at the scouting combine this weekend, but Wilson is notably a center. Next Gen Stats ranked Membou as the most athletic tackle overall in this year’s draft class. Some teams have talked to him about his willingness to play guard — his arm length of 33 1/2 inches is perhaps a driving force of those questions.

But the other tests offer some optimism. Membou also had the best broad jump (9 feet, 7 inches) and vertical leap (34 inches) among linemen at a combine brimming with athleticism.

There’s something else playing in his favor. It’s a relatively weak tackle class, a contrast to a year ago, when eight were plucked in the first round alone. The Chiefs entered the combine with only preliminary grades on players, but their sheet on tackles wasn’t nearly that deep.

That favors Membou.

The Chiefs, not so much.

Their offensive line needs help, even after electing to use the franchise tag on Trey Smith last week. That move doesn’t address the most glaring problem on the 2024 line — the blind-side protection — and it makes it more likely they will have to address it cheaply. That might entail keying on a player who can fill in at left tackle initially, and then potentially slide to the right side in 2026, when the Chiefs could move on from Taylor’s exorbitant contract.

It won’t be Membou. He is on the rise.

It’s not his first time on an unexpected rise, either.

A day before his 40-yard dash, Membou told reporters at the combine in Indianapolis that he “was going to quit” playing football after his sophomore year of high school, but his coach Jamar Mozee told him he had a shot to play varsity football. Mozee is now an assistant coach at the University of Nebraska.

“That’s why I started to kind of take it serious,” he told reporters, later adding, “I think it was really big for me — just to have someone that believed in me so I could develop my own confidence.”

He has a lot of believers now.

____

©2025 The Kansas City Star. Visit kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.