Category: Football

The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety

Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that the Giants haven’t had a decent kick returner since Dave… Continue reading The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety

The Best of All Possible (Football) Universes

Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly small, making this a 3.8-sigma effect, almost enough to claim the detection of a new… Continue reading The Best of All Possible (Football) Universes

Concussions, Back Problems, and Odd Statistics

Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture: The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players… Continue reading Concussions, Back Problems, and Odd Statistics

Does the Regular Season Matter?

This past weekend, I ended up hearing sports-radio pinheads holding forth proudly about their ignorance of college basketball. The justification for this is that “the regular season doesn’t matter,” since the NCAA tournament is single-elimination, and lesser-known teams keep ending up making big runs in the tournament. Since there’s apparently no way in their world… Continue reading Does the Regular Season Matter?

Over-Ruled

I’m a big fan of (American) football, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that I never played organized football. It was largely a matter of timing– the coaches when I was in junior high were not people I’d’ve been interested in playing for, and when they hired a good guy to run… Continue reading Over-Ruled

Entangled in Sports Analogies

Having written in defense of analogies in physics yesterday, I should note that not all of the analogies that are brought out in an attempt to clarify physics concepts are good. For example, there’s this incredibly strained opening to a Science News article on entanglement: If the Manning brothers were quantum physicists as well as… Continue reading Entangled in Sports Analogies