Kind: captions
Language: en
the perfect football pass a thing of
beauty and bewilderment the way the
football travels midair baffled
physicist for years if you're in the
physicist World you'd expect the
football to travel like this and come
down when you watch a long pass from a
talented quarterback you can just see
the the football just travel like that
so why does the nose of the football go
from pointing upward to rotating
downward when most things stay the same
orientation as they move through the air
there are two key players involved
gravity and angular momentum so what is
angular
momentum first it'll help to understand
momentum you're probably used to
experiencing linear momentum imagine
you're a passenger in a car traveling at
40 mph and the driver suddenly breaks
but you continue moving forward that's
what seat belts are for body emotion
tends to stay in motion unless acted on
by a force and that's conservation of
momentum then there's angular momentum
which is when an object with mass is
spinning you can see this property in
action when an ice skater speeds up when
they pull their arms in in football
conservation of angular momentum is the
reason why the ball changes orientation
while it spins through the air let's
compare a football spinning vertically
on a flat surface to a spinning top the
top of the top will describe a circular
or orbit around a vertical axis the
vertical axis is set up by the force of
gravity gravity is trying to pull the
top over but the top refuses to fall
over to conserve angular momentum it
processes in a circle a football acts
kind of like a top a symmetrical top now
the axis about which the ball rotates is
not caused by gravity in the case of the
football it's processing around the
onrushing force of air the the ball
experiences the force of the air pushes
on the ball causing it to wobble around
its spinning axis and this wobble
eventually pushes the nose down gravity
absolutely acts on the football but its
effect is to cause the ball to go up and
then come down in that curved parabolic
trajectory put them all together and you
get that beautiful
pass but to gain the most amount of
yards in the shortest amount of time the
quarterback needs to keep a lot of
things in mind thing I look for on a
quarterback is a lot of intelligence and
understanding after that it's accuracy
with the arm timing to get the ball out
and just awareness and the spin of the
ball is crucial to getting it to go the
distance you don't throw a spiral that
thing is going to flutter we call those
Ducks the ball starts to flut doesn't
get velocity doesn't get distance and
those end up getting intercepted by The
Defenders here's how they get that
perfect spiral so your fir from was come
from these sers and the other last two
in the back is kind of more so for the
guidance I also try to like have like a
gap right here from that it's all about
where your arm is going and then the
snap of your wrist and they have to
release the ball quickly in those
seconds once the ball is snapped you
know the quarterback is focused on
several different things so we're
catching the ball we're also scanning
what's going on in front of us we're
backing up away from the line we're
actually flipping the ball to put the
laces on our hand physics may be an in
part of football but to players it's all
about time and practice and repetition