Newton's Football, page 1
Copyright © 2013 by Allen St. John and
Ainissa G. Ramirez, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
St. John, Allen.
Newton’s football : the science behind America’s game / Allen St. John,
Ainissa G. Ramirez, PH.D.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-345-54514-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54515-2
1. Football. 2. Physics. 3. Sports sciences I. Title.
GV951.S73 2013
796.332—dc23 2013031521
Title-page image: © iStockphoto.com
www.ballantinebooks.com
Jacket design and illustration by Wes Youssi/M80 Design
v3.1
“Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.”
—CHUCK KLOSTERMAN,
EATING THE DINOSAUR
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: THE PAST
1. THE DIVINELY RANDOM BOUNCE OF THE PROLATE SPHEROID
2. TEDDY ROOSEVELT IN THE UNCANNY VALLEY
3. THE ROBUST AND FRAGILE FACE MASK OF OTTO GRAHAM
4. VINCE LOMBARDI’S BEAUTIFUL MIND
5. DARWIN’S PLACEKICKER: SURVIVAL OF THE FLATTEST
PART TWO: THE GAME
6. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT OF GREG COOK
7. AS MEL BLOUNT CHANNELS THOMAS EDISON
8. HOW IS A QUARTERBACK LIKE YOUR LAPTOP?
9. SAM WYCHE AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF CHAOS
10. PLAYING DEFENSE, HEISENBERG STYLE
PART THREE: THE PLAYERS
11. HOW TO TURN A BIG MAC INTO AN OUTSIDE LINEBACKER
12. SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S FANTASY FOOTBALL DRAFT
13. CHOOSING YOUR NEXT QUARTERBACK? THEY HAVE AN APP FOR THAT
PART FOUR: THE FUTURE
14. OF RISK, INNOVATION, AND COACHES WHO BEHAVE LIKE MONKEYS
15. DESPERATION PLUS INSPIRATION EQUALS 16,632 ELIGIBLE RECEIVERS
16. THE MAN WHO LOVED TACKLING
17. WHY WOODPECKERS DON’T GET CONCUSSIONS
EPILOGUE: SHOULD THE NFL BAN HELMETS?
FOOTBALL GLOSSARY
SCIENCE GLOSSARY
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Other Books by This Author
About the Authors
INTRODUCTION
“Players are ant-like entities,” said Stephen Wolfram, straining for an analogy. “Imagine that they have simple rules for interacting with each other—like, if two things are heading straight at each other, they both avoid on the left.”
He paused for a moment.
“Even though the rules for the entities are quite simple, the aggregate behavior can be quite complicated.”
Wolfram stopped himself.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about football,” he admitted.
The MacArthur Fellow had been saying this over and over again in slightly different ways for half an hour. But the truth of it snapped into sharp focus when he started comparing Logan Mankins to a bug.
It was a typically atypical day for Team Newton. Throughout our research for this book, we would set up our conference call magic, roll tape on the Olympus digital recorder with the Mickey Mouse–ear microphones, and talk football with some of the smartest and most accomplished people in the world. One afternoon it was Jerry Rice, who caught a football better than anyone ever. The next it was Lorna Gibson, who can tell you everything you’d ever want to know about why woodpeckers don’t get concussions.
It was a great gig.
But the best day of all was when we talked to Wolfram and Sam Wyche.
Wolfram might not be a household name, but in the scientific world he’s Tom Brady; his brainpower is matched only by his ambition. His projects range from a cool book that tries to explain literally everything to even cooler software that will do your algebra homework for you. Talking science with Wolfram is as close as you can get to hearing Einstein riff about relativity. But for all his fame, Wolfram is passionate about helping ordinary people use scientific tools to understand the world, which is why he agreed to give us a few minutes on a January evening, eight hours after we hung up with Wyche.
Here’s what you need to know about Sam Wyche. The former Cincinnati Bengals coach once stopped a full-fledged stadium riot dead in its tracks with nine words: “You don’t live in Cleveland, you live in Cincinnati!” It was the sort of thing that happens in movies, except that this was real life and those were real glass bottles.
That morning last January, we had called Wyche, hoping to talk about Bill Walsh. We were searching for insight on the West Coast offense, the passing attack that revolutionized football in the 1980s. But Walsh himself had passed away in 2007, so we were seeking out his colleagues to fill in the gaps.
Having played backup quarterback for the Bengals and coached the passing game for the 49ers, Wyche had ridden shotgun on one of the most remarkable journeys in football history, a long strange trip from Cincinnati to the Super Bowl. While Walsh tinkered, Wyche watched.
Full of homespun humor and down-home charm, Wyche cordially answered our questions. But he had another story he was itching to tell: his own. So after he finished explaining Walsh’s pass progressions in loving detail, Wyche started in on the tale of his own slightly crazy spin on the West Coast offense: the no-huddle.
We were on the verge of interrupting him, because we had another interview scheduled in five minutes. But Wyche is such an engaging storyteller that we simply shut up and listened as he explained why he had decided to toss a century’s worth of conventional wisdom out the window. It was a great story, but we didn’t know what to do with it. Not yet, anyway.
Our conversation with Wolfram that evening quickly settled into a feedback loop. He would apologize for not knowing anything about football. We would assure him that it didn’t matter. He would apologize yet again. We were a little surprised to be offering reassurance to a certified genius, but …
Then suddenly Wolfram forgot about football and started talking about chaos theory. It changed everything. “It is a subtle business,” he explained, in his lilting English accent. “The knob of the chaos theory idea is the dependence on the initial conditions. Change the initial conditions, and the outcomes diverge exponentially. That is the core of chaos theory.”
In this lightbulb moment we each realized that Wolfram was, however improbably, describing what Wyche’s innovative game plan had brought to the football field. The no-huddle offense was chaos theory at work.
We understood that Newton’s Football would be a book not about football or about science but about ideas. Ideas coming from the most unexpected sources, converging in the most delightful ways.
On the surface, Wyche and Wolfram are as different as two people can be, the cosmic Odd Couple. During our conversation, for example, each of them talked about how to tell when a football player is getting tired.
Wolfram immediately reached into his bag of high-tech tricks. “It is now possible with image processing to look at your face and see the tiny bits of color every time the blood is being oxygenated as it is being pumped through your arteries. You can measure it with an iPad app,” Wolfram explained enthusiastically. “It will measure your heart rate by looking at you. There is a whole area of science devoted to determining what a human is thinking from outside. You watch the micro-expressions or, if you could measure it, you look at the skin conductance, or something like this.”
Wyche, on the other hand, suggested you look at the guy’s thumbs. (It’s an old quarterback’s trick that we let him explain fully in chapter 9.)
But for all of their differences, Wyche and Wolfram are brothers from another mother. They share an innate curiosity and the intellectual courage to look beyond the conventional wisdom. Both ask “Why not?”
At least when they’re not stopping riots or comparing football players to insects.
Why Newton’s football?
Good question. Set the WABAC machine for 1666. Isaac Newton was out for an after-dinner stroll when he actually did see an apple fall. Through the ages, billions of apples had fallen, but just then Newton was in a particularly contemplative mood, pondering the planets, and he saw in that apple something that no one had ever seen before. He wondered: Why does an apple fall perpendicular to the ground? That Falling Apple was a perfect parable for how discovery and innovation happen.
That virtual meeting of the minds between Wyche and Wolfram was a Falling Apple, too. Part serendipity, yes, but it also required a certain openness to possibility.
The history of football is full of Falling Apples.
As is this book.
You’ll learn how Otto Graham’s mangled cheek inadvertently provided the catalyst for football’s concussion epidemic. How a Holocaust survivor’s relocation lottery reinvented placekicking. And how an undiagnosed rotator cuff tear gave rise to the West Coast offense.
And of course
Here’s what Newton’s Football isn’t: a comprehensive history of the game or an ordinary book about the physics of the sport. Those have already been done. But it does tell a story, a narrative that begins when the ball was a pig’s bladder and continues through today as pro football ponders its uncertain future.
It’s a story about innovation. A story about the way small changes can revolutionize the game. And a story about the eternal appeal of the bone-crushing hit, and the corresponding need to make sure that no bones are actually crushed.
Finally, a little hint. Like Wyche and Wolfram, these chapters often bring together elements that at first seem to have little to do with each other. But they do belong together. More than that, they illuminate each other. It might take a few pages, but the questions will get answered and the connections made. Just as ours were.
Allen St. John, Upper Montclair, N.J., and
Ainissa G. Ramirez, Ph.D., New Haven, CT.
PART ONE
THE PAST
“Gentlemen, this is a football.”
—VINCE LOMBARDI
CHAPTER 1
THE DIVINELY RANDOM BOUNCE OF THE PROLATE SPHEROID
DeSean Jackson panicked.
The Philadelphia Eagles Pro Bowl kick returner was standing at his own 35-yard line on a chilly December afternoon at newly opened MetLife Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands, but the last thing that he expected was the ball.
The plan was simple. New York Giants punter Matt Dodge was going to kick the ball away from Jackson and out of bounds. That might give the Eagles just enough time to throw a Hail Mary into the end zone, allowing the Giants a chance to regroup as this wild game, in which the Eagles had come back from a 24–3 deficit to tie the score at 31, went into overtime.
And then the prolate spheroid did its thing. A bad snap almost fluttered over Dodge’s head. Dodge reined the ball in, and his plan was to make contact with the ball just off center and send it toward the sideline, away from Jackson. But Dodge hit it on center, just an inch or two away from where he intended. So instead of lofting harmlessly out of bounds, the ball made a beeline for Jackson.
The Eagles ace return man couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. He watched the ball drop, wobbling like a dying quail. The quivering punt was falling to earth just a little short of where Jackson expected it, and instead of taking a step to get under the ball the way his coaches taught him in Pop Warner football, Jackson reached out for it. Starting to run before he had full possession of the ball, DeSean Jackson watched the Wilson “Duke” slip right through the fingers of his dark green gloves.
That’s when he began to panic.
With good reason. A herd of Giants defenders were heading toward him at full speed. If the ball bounced forward, one of them would scoop it up, leaving nothing but daylight between the Giants’ defender and the Eagles’ end zone. If it bounded backward, same deal. But this time the ball fell to Jackson’s right. It rolled cleanly, almost gently, end over end the way a small child might, twice, three times, four.
It would probably take the faculty of MIT a full afternoon to parse all the options of where and how that ball might have traveled after it slipped through DeSean Jackson’s hands. Almost all of them would have been disastrous for the Eagles.
Instead, the ball rolled around tamely, settling only a yard or two away, where Jackson could pick it up. And thus began the return that came to be known as “The Miracle at the New Meadowlands.” Jackson stopped in his tracks, retreating a few steps as he picked up the ball. As he stutter-stepped and pivoted to get going in the right direction, the Giants were in disarray. One defender fell down. Another ran into his own teammate. Still another Giant launched at Jackson and hit another blue jersey.
Jackson looked up, and instead of blue, he saw green—lots of it. The wobbling ball led him right to a crease in the Giants coverage. Now aligned with his blockers, he used his 4.4 speed to motor through the gap and down the right sideline. For dramatic effect, Jackson ran parallel to the goal line before landing in the end zone for the first game-ending punt-return touchdown in NFL history. All because of a random bounce.
It starts with the ball.
Pick up an official NFL football, Wilson Model F1100. It’s called the Duke, named after the late New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, who was named after the Duke of Wellington. But forget about that, and forget, too, about Commissioner Roger Goodell’s autograph branded into the leather. Instead run your fingers across the pebbled cover. Look very closely, and you’ll find a few tiny Wilson logos that are just a bit bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. Explore the stitches that join the four elliptical panels and the bright white laces that play counterpoint to the ball’s otherwise sleek silhouette. Pull back for a moment and study its simple, streamlined shape. The ball is nothing if not purposeful. It all but invites you to wrap your hand around it.
But looks can be deceiving. That shape is anything but simple. A mathematician would explain that a football is a prolate spheroid. The circumference around its poles (a minimum of 28 inches) is longer than the circumference around its equator (at least 21 inches). The earth, by contrast, slightly flattened at its poles, is an oblate spheroid. Why is a football that shape? Ask Arnold the Pig.
Rewind to the mid-1850s. America sits on the brink of war, the game of football is in its infancy, and the very first footballs are made from inflated pig bladders. A pig’s bladder itself is relatively small and, after it’s removed from the pig, resembles an uninflated balloon. But it’s also remarkably flexible, and with proper conditioning, a pig’s bladder can stretch to many times its normal size when it’s blown up.
As an example of proto-recycling, turning a bladder into a ball is ingenious. But these early footballs were better as symbols than as actual balls. They’d leak or split, and sometimes to keep their shape they’d be stuffed with straw or some other random material. For this reason, these pig-sourced balls fell out of fashion quickly, replaced by balls stitched from leather and rubber—but not before lending a cowhide football its evocative, if incorrect, nickname: pigskin. And not before establishing the unusual shape that would come to define the game of football.
Let’s clarify what we mean by football. In the days of pig bladder balls, football was something of a pastiche, its rules and style of play very much in a state of flux. The game that would come to be known as “American” football shared common roots with both rugby and the game that Americans call soccer and the rest of the world calls football. We’ll discuss the nuances of the game’s evolution later, but for the moment, let’s focus on the changes in the ball itself. Because in sports, the ball is everything.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, both football and soccer were played with roundish balls that were somewhat irregular in shape because of their origins as, well, part of a pig. As the games diverged, so did the balls. Soccer became a game that centered around kicking. And given the difficulty of controlling the ball with one’s feet, one thing became clear: the rounder the ball, the better.
As soon as advances in materials made it practical, soccer moved toward a ball that was as round as possible. The panels became smoother and more uniform, and the seams joining the panels became less prominent. The round balls used in sports like baseball, tennis, and even basketball feature a slight but crucial asymmetry. The orientation of the cover on the round core is what gives Justin Verlander’s slider its break and why Kobe Bryant will align a basketball just so—fingers spread across the seams, index finger pointing at the valve—for a free-throw attempt. The cover of a soccer ball, on the other hand, is made up of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons, the panels forming a figure called a truncated icosahedron, which mathematicians have studied since the days of Archimedes. Leonardo da Vinci simply called it “divine.”* A soccer ball may not be as purely symmetrical as, say, a billiard ball, but it’s functionally symmetrical. Players don’t care much about exactly where they kick the ball. A modern soccer ball may even be getting too round. In pursuit of more perfect sphericity, the soccer balls used in the 2006 World Cup abandoned the traditional thirty-two-panel geometric design in favor of one based on fourteen curved panels. Those sleeker balls were a source of controversy, as the smooth profile allowed the ball to dart in unpredictable ways.† Sometimes, geometry is destiny.
