Carnell Tate’s Combine stumble might've just complicated things for Giants

The NFL Combine isn’t the be-all, end-all for draft prospects, but it does give us a peek at their athletic ceiling. You can argue all day that running drills in shorts doesn’t translate to Sundays, and honestly, I’ll listen to both sides. Either way, the spectacle pulls in the entire football world, with fans glued to leaderboards waiting to see who blows up next and who squanders their opportunity.

For the New York Giants and their fans, most of the attention was locked in on the top receiver prospects, especially Ohio State’s Carnell Tate. He’s become a mock draft favorite at No. 5 and keeps getting penciled in as the perfect complement to Malik Nabers. Around draft circles, he’s basically been anointed as Jaxson Dart’s next best friend. Or maybe not.

Sometimes you just don’t want to rock the boat, so when the 6-foot-2, 192-pounder took his sprinter stance and posted a 4.54 in the 40, it wasn’t exactly the fireworks some fans were hoping for:

In hindsight, you almost wonder if he would’ve been better off skipping the drills altogether. USC's Makai Lemon and Arizona State's Jordyn Tyson both opted out of the testing drills entirely and could be the biggest beneficiaries of Tate's performance.

Carnell Tate’s 40 time could throw a wrench into Giants' draft plans

The biggest mistake the 21-year-old made was not trying to counter his underwhelming 40 time with field drills, passing up the perfect opportunity to show off his smooth route-running and strong hands to get back in the scouts' good graces. That could prove costly. Now, he'll need a really strong Pro Day to fight his way back up the draft board.

While a 4.5 40 time isn't going to completely annihilate his stock, it might be the difference between feeling comfortable taking him at five or pivoting to someone who took the Combine by storm, like his fellow Buckeye Sonny Styles.

ESPN’s Adam Schefter quickly noted that some GMs had Tate in the 4.45–4.47 range, but as a former Division I track athlete and coach, I can tell you hand times and official times don’t always live in the same universe.

Players have overcome underwhelming 40 times before, and they’ll do it again. Michael Thomas, DeAndre Hopkins, Keenan Allen, Davante Adams, and Allen Robinson all ran 4.5 or slower and went on to carve out elite careers. So acting like Tate’s 4.54 is some career-altering death sentence would be ridiculous. The issue isn’t the time itself. It’s that he didn’t use the rest of the weekend to remind everyone why he was even in the top-five conversation to begin with, and that decision might’ve cost him real momentum with teams like the G-Men.

He’ll have his Pro Day to show off the ball tracking, body control, and route running that made him a 2025 All-Big Ten First Team selection. But the margin at the top of the draft is thin, and right now, it feels like he gave a little ground away.