The
Beginning of the Pass
The Physics of the Forward Pass
is a tremendous art and quite possibly a
physicist secret topic to talk about. It
involves the Quarterback being able to transfer
torque and energy into a football and the
receiver to be able to use his hand-eye
coordination to catch the football that has been
thrown to him. The science involved not just in
the forward pass, but in American Football in
general is an extremely interesting topic to
learn about and understand. Hopefully These next
few web pages can help the people who read it,
learn a small slice about the forward pass and
possibly encourage them to look at this physics
topic themselves someday.
For a Quarterback to throw a football, they have to give the football an initial potential and kinetic energy to travel the distance through the air to reach his receiver; where the final potential and kinetic energy will be equal to the initial potential and kinetic energy. To do this, the Quarterback must create a rotation torque to provide the football with the energy to travel through the air. Or as Drew Brees describes it during FSN Sports Science in 2009, "To throw the perfect pass, it is all about the kinetic chain. It is now just a matter of that rhythm of the energy being transferred from my feet, than to my hips, all the way up to my shoulders, and as my arm is coming through, the last thing to leave that ball is my index finger.
This
torque is created around the Quarterbacks moment
of Inertia and helps the football travel through
the air. Most footballs, after thrown, follow a
parabolic projectile motion. A projectile, as
explained by Randall Knight " is an object that
moves in two dimensions under the influence of
only gravity." The next slide will continue with
this and why the football is able to ignore air
resistance and make sure it stays as a projectile
only influenced by gravity.