Acme Packing Company
If you haven’t noticed, the Green Bay Packers have invested in speed at the wide receiver position over the last several years. Although Matt LaFleur has gained a reputation for preferring big-bodied wide receivers who can block, the team has moved on from a few of those players this offseason and those who are left are virtually all burners, regardless of body composition.
With the team expected to start a trio of Christian Watson, Matthew Golden, and Jayden Reed, I got to thinking: is the Packers’ receiver room the fastest in the NFL?
So I set out to answer that question. First, I had to decide on a methodology, however. The simplest and most accessible way to assess a player’s pure speed is by looking at the 40-yard dash time that a player clocked at his Scouting Combine or Pro Day. That’s easy enough to look up, at least in most cases — though for players who were injured or chose not to run the 40, I had to use projected 40 times from Draftscout.com. Still, those examples are few and far between.
Then there is the matter of projecting who will actually be on NFL rosters in the fall. This is a bit clunky, but I settled on taking the top six wideouts for each team, as listed on their depth charts on ESPN.com. Surely that won’t be how it works out come week 1, but it’s as good a projection as any at this point in the offseason.
After looking up 192 wideouts’ 40 times and averaging the times for each team’s top six receivers, the Packers came in second in the entire NFL with an average time of 4.388 seconds — just 0.005 seconds behind the fastest group. For their part, every one of the Packers’ top six receivers ran under 4.5 seconds at their respective Combines, with only one player running slower than 4.45:
The team that comes in just a hair ahead of the Packers is a surprising one: it’s their divisional rivals, the Chicago Bears. Their top two receivers ran perfectly respectable 40s, with Rome Odunze clocking 4.45 seconds and Luther Burden III coming in at 4.41. However, the Bears get a huge boost from some 2026 offseason acquisitions, three of whom ran sub-4.4. Those players are Kalif Raymond (4.39), Scotty Miller (4.39), and rookie Zavion Thomas (4.28, who posted the 3rd-fastest time at the 2026 Combine). Thomas’ addition in particular shrinks the Bears’ average time compared to the group of players on the roster to finish the 2025 season, though that group still had a solid 4.432 time that would put them 10th in the current list.
Perhaps most impressively, Green Bay and Chicago are the only two teams to average a sub-4.4 40 across their top six wideouts. Most of the league falls between 4.4 and 4.5, with...
