The day after his legendary chase-down play, DK Metcalf received a lighthearted Twitter invitation to join the USA Track and Field team.
He’s now on the precipice of calling an Olympics-sized bluff.
According to NBC Sports, the Seahawks receiver plans to be one of 16 competitors running the the 100-meter dash at USATF’s Golden Games and Distance Open, a precursor to Olympic Trials.
The event will take place on Sunday in Walnut, California. And judging by Metcalf’s own Twitter account, he views his entry as anything but a joke.
“DK’s agent told us that he really wants to try to make the Olympics and asked what steps he needs to take,” USA Track and Field Managing Director Adam Schmenk told Yahoo Sports' Jeff Eisenberg. “We walked him through what the auto qualifying time was that he would have to run in a sanctioned USATF event and told him that we would help him find a lane if and when he wanted to do this.”
Now the important question: Can Metcalf actually do it? Per NBC Sports, a 10.05-second finish would earn No. 14 an automatic qualification to the Olympic Trials. At the very least, he’d need to break 10.2 seconds -- with legal tailwind of no more than two meters per second.
These numbers are prohibitive by nature, even for sprinters. They look daunting for the Ole Miss product who last donned track spikes as a high school hurdler.
Then again, Metcalf isn’t built like normal humans. When he tracked Budda Baker down last season, Next Gen Stats clocked him at a top speed of 22.64 miles per hour -- good for a 9.88-second time over 100 meters.
Metcalf obviously won’t hit his top speed right out of the blocks. He also won’t be weighed down by pads and a helmet, making him a fun guinea pig for the trial of “football speed” vs. “track speed.”
Should “football speed” be enough, Metcalf might report to Tokyo instead of training camp this summer.