Defense

Offense sells tickets but defense wins games. The dramatic collisions between players moving at high speeds are one of the many attractions of football. There are many reasons for these astonishing hits on the smaller offensive players. Defensive players are large and exert larger force on their opponent.

When Sean Lee is moving one direction and collides with Brandon Pettigrew the two come to a stop and fall to the ground, the players have added up to the same total after the collision as we had discussed in the previous scenario. The smaller Brandon Pettigrew must have been going faster than the heavier Sean Lee resulting in the change of momentum and the force expierenced was the same.

The objective for the defensive player to make a perfect tackle is to tackle the runner low as seen in Figure 1. It takes less force to tackle low as opposed to tackling high as you see in figure 2. For the spectacular hits we see where the ball runner is drove back gruesomely the defender hits him in his center mass.