Jay here is right I expect. It's very likely that 95-to-99 is a 'speed range' within which all guys run at the same speed. This essentially means player speeds in madden are not 0-to-100, but rather 0-to-20 (you divide 100 by 5, which is the width of each speed range ). What Jay is suggesting is that we have more of them, more steps to the staircase so to speak.

Personally, I'm not really sure if 20 levels of differentiation in player speed are insufficient. If we actually used all 20 levels (most guys in the game have speed of at least 40, thus eliminating the usefulness of 40% of the available ratings, and essentially providing only 12 distinguishable levels of player speed) and the lowest level wasnt this turtle speed that, for example, Tommy Maddox has, then there'd be a really rather decently realistic depiction of player speed.

The problem really is that speed as it is now serves to hide some other unrealistic factors. For example, giving all quarterbacks their natural speed would make QB rushing overly effective since - if you notice - defenders only come to tackle a QB if they're pass rushing, spying him, or he has crossed the line of scrimmage. Thus often a defender would blindly follow his man with the QB clearly belting it up the field. Slow QBs equal a (sloppy) solution to the problem.