PROF. MIXES FOOTBALL WITH PHYSICS

by Marita Graube

From blasting pop-bottle rockets to manipulating marshmallows in a vacuum, teachers find many ways to engage students while demonstrating science. University of Nebraska physics professor Timothy Gay faces a bigger challenge: capture the attention of 78,000 fans at Cornhusker football games.

“Today, we’re going to talk about momentum,” says Gay, as Huskervision, a pair of 17-by-23 ft. stadium screens, displays his larger-than-life image standing next to a lecture-hall chalkboard.

“To make an effective tackle or block, a player must have more momentum than his opponent,” he says. A brutal replay shows a Cornhusker steamroll an opponent as Gay explains that “a player’s momentum is equal to his weight or mass times his speed.” In slow motion, the unsuspecting opponent crumbles as Gay sums it up. “Using Newton’s second law, we can calculate the force of the hit to be about two-thirds of a ton. Yeeouch-that’s gotta hurt!”

The one-minute videos, called Football Physics, started in 1999 with a desire to add an academic flavor to Huskervision’s usual content of replays and statistics. Jeff Schmahl, the head of Huskervision, thought physics was a natural fit with football and sent out an undergraduate journalism major to recruit a football-loving physics professor. She found Timothy Gay, a former tackle at the California Institute of Technology*.

Gay was easily convinced to perform the part. “I think it is important for working scientists to explain to the public, who is paying the bills after all, what it is they find exciting about physics and why it is an important intellectual pursuit,” he says.

But at first Gay worried about the repercussions of popularizing science. “I must admit I was bit ambivalent about doing this initially,” he says. “The main reason was that possibly my credentials as a serious scientist would be compromised.”

Yet Gay found that his colleagues were extremely supportive. The football players also enjoy sharing their turf with a science geek. “Generally, the players are interested and want to learn anything they possibly can to help them play better,” he says.

Members of the football team take part in many of his videos to help demonstrate examples and hold the audience’s interest. In one video, featuring the air drag and symmetry of a football, Gay catches a star player’s perfect spiral and tries to return the throw with a pathetically wobbly spin. He shrugs apologetically. “Understanding the theoretical principle doesn’t guarantee instant success as a quarterback,” he tells the audience.

Gay’s humorous delivery style works well for the videos, leveraging his authentic “geeky scientist” look, complete with bow tie and glasses. But he is less “Bill Nye the Science Guy” and more of a relaxed stand-up comedian. “It’s just my natural personality, possibly amped up a bit for video,” he admits.

While no formal metrics measure the audience’s retention from the videos, Gay is confident about audience approval. Several students told him they became interested in taking physics after seeing his videos on the big screen. During the segments, Gay notices a hush fall over the crowd. But they’re only quiet for so long and have a limited attention span. “If you go much over a minute,” he says, “they start looking up at the planes.”

Syncing sports with science: best practices

Create a good relationship with the team and coach

Let the football team know that you’re not trying to poach on its territory but want to help the fans and the players understand more about the game.

Demand equal parts science and sport

At times, Gay felt that the producers only wanted replays of a game’s spectacular hits. “I think I would have been a little more clear up front that we would have equal parts physics and football, and not just cheerleading.” However, he insisted on including learning and found a happy medium with the producers.

Spice up the science

Humor and goofiness helps keep physics fun and a fickle audience entertained. Gay seems to play up his nerdiness and deliver his lines with natural comedic timing. A bloopers tape of botched lines was also well received by Cornhusker fans, says Gay.

Include the players

Gay incorporates popular players in his segments. “The crowd always wants to see their favorite player. It also works visually because here I am, the nerdy professor next to this enormous hulk in a football outfit.”

Shorten the segments

Initially, Gay wrote a three-minute script, but was told to cut it down. “I’ve discovered that the attention span of an audience is typically one minute,” he says. Playing the short segments during a time-out break, and not halftime, also catches more people in their seats.

Keep the costs low

The segments were produced by undergraduate journalism students, keeping the budget near zero with the exception of occasional props.

Not every football fan becomes a physics fan. “Ten percent of them are really kind of annoyed,” says Gay.

“‘We’re here to watch football! Why would we want to mess around with physics?’” But he adds that the majority of the fans’ feedback has been positive. The videos were also well received among science lovers during Gay’s presentation at the 2004 AAAS Annual Meeting, where a jam-packed room awaited every video and exploded with laughter during the punch lines.

Even the NFL recognized the popularity of Football Physics. NFL Films worked with Gay during 2002 to produce content for “Blast!,” a television show designed to promote football to foreign audiences. By request, his demeanor for the films was less playful than the Huskervision shows. “NFL Films wanted me to be ‘serious and academic,’” says Gay.

With all the hoopla over Football Physics during the last five years, Gay has received a lot of press.

Perhaps as a result, he’s media savvy and quips many juicy sound bites. The university’s public relations department also releases the timely news about Football Physics and its success, while a Web site offers replays of the videos if you didn’t make the game (physics.unl.edu/outreach/football.html).

Beyond football, Gay has dabbled in a video for gymnastics and one for track. He finds football easiest for his videos because the topics are easily tied with a visual play like a big tackle or a long pass.

Gay estimates he’s delivered about 50 topics by now and is running out of ideas for new material. “If I could spend five minutes on a topic, it’d be great. But you are limited by the number of topics that you can squeeze into one minute.” More detailed topics will be presented in Gay’s upcoming book, The Physics of Football, published by Rodale Press.

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Marita Graube is a freelance writer in Seattle.

*Editor’s note: Yes, Caltech once had a football team. Its heyday was during World War II. The war-time team was primarily made up of men who came from Stanford as part of a Navy training program, called V-12. They were called to active duty and assigned to Caltech. The legendary 1944 Caltech football team (undefeated and unscored upon) was recently inducted into the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame. Caltech eventually dropped intercollegiate football but continued with “club” play until 1993-94, when the football program officially vanished from campus.