For your amusement:

This should help to answer the question, what is the fastest run possible?

At 60fps, this is 7:21.25, but timed on YouTube, it's 7:20.5 or thereabouts, within +- .2 seconds, I think. Not sure what accounts for the discrepancy. Emulator is BizHawk.

A few features of this TAS:

• no tackles, including the kick returner
• running out of bounds right at zero
• no possession by the CPU
• getting onside kick return or kickoff fumble return

This run features Tim Brown not getting tackled on the kick return for the entire first quarter. I have been able to evade tacklers with Tim Brown for about 1:30 of game time, but doing this for a whole quarter is unlikely.

If I could have gotten a one-cycle kickoff resulting in an onside return, that would have saved a few frames, and if the CPU would have kicked a bit sooner, that also might have saved a few frames, but I'm not aware of any major time savings to be had. I tried to hike the ball and select the plays and so forth at the first available frame to do so. Maybe with trimming every excess frame, I might be just under 7:21, but that's about it.

By contrast with NESCardinality's run:

• only three tackles (including a Tim Brown fumble resulting in a Bo Jackson recovery, I didn't know Bo was on special teams!)
• score was a touchdown (maybe a second or three more than an intentional out of bounds/play selection/field goal animation, I haven't done a time comparison there)
• a few fractions of a second going out of bounds on the first quarter

Time to save, but it wouldn't be easy. You need a lot of things going your way, like maybe only one tackle in the whole game.

Looks like a WR record, and a significantly faster (several seconds) TAS, require getting a safety. There is indeed time to save. As far as the WR is concerned, I guess it depends on how mad the lads are. I expect the current WR will stand for a long time since it's such a slog to line up all the ideal conditions just to have an eligible run.