I have complained about ESPN's Sport Science before. Honestly, I am not a big fan. Maybe this short segment from Monday night's Saints-Niners game can give some illumination:
Basically, Sport Science seems to be making the claim that Troy Polamalu is as fast as a bolt of lighting. Really? Come on. How do they get to this conclusion? Let me step through their example. The situation starts with Troy zooming past the Titan's offensive line to make a sack. Slow motion analysis shows that he was 0.1 seconds away from the line of scrimmage when the ball was snapped. How did he do this? Either he knew what the snap count was, or he was lucky in his timing. That is it. Nothing more to explain.
Sport Science takes this to the next level. This pretty much sums up their show:
"In fact, Polamalu would have been off sides if the ball was snapped just one tenth of a second later. That's nearly as fast as a bolt of lighting. "
Before looking at the errors Sport Science made, let me measure Polamalu's speed using Tracker video analysis. First, I don't have a normal speed version of this clip, just the slow motion one from Sport Science. This is kind of rough, but if I totally guess that they slowed the video down to a frame rate of 90 fps (instead of the 30 fps it is played in), then I have the following vertical position data:
This gives an acceleration of around -11 m/s2. Close enough for me. Note that he probably isn't in free fall this whole time, and he isn't a point particle. Ok, now to look at the horizontal motion.
This gives a horizontal speed of 2.6 m/s (6 mph). Not too fast. Not lighting fast.
First, lightning is not a simple process. There are several things that are happening, so the speed does not necessarily make sense. How fast does the leader of a bolt go? According to wikipedia, it can go up to 22,000 mph (almost 10,000 m/s). How far would this go in 0.1 seconds? 1,000 meters. Ok, no point going further with the physics. Lightning (however you measure it) is super fast compared to 3 m/s. I think it is safe to say that Polamalu is not lightning fast.
I hate to be an attacker, but this seems to be Sport Science's gimmick:
- Find some cool sports phenomena
- Get some number from that. Really, this could be ANYTHING that you want.
- Find some way of comparing that number to something AMAZING.
- If your number doesn't have a good match, find a different number and try again.
In this case, they started with the number 0.1 seconds. Hmmmmmm. What takes 0.1 seconds? I know! Lightning! Fast as lightning. You see how it works?
What should they do then? There are some really cool and interesting things that happen in sports. You don't have to fake it like Sports Science did in this case. In this instance they could have done something similar to my analysis above. Sure, he was almost off sides, but it was mostly luck (which is still interesting). Even if he was exactly offsides, would the referees be able to catch that? What is the error associated with off sides calls? That would be an interesting angle on this piece.
Here are some other titles that were suggested for this post:
- Sport Science is dumb (again)
- Sport Science: why do you do the things that you do when you know they are wrong?
- Death, Taxes, and Sports Science Stupidity
- Sport Science: who needs real science?
- Sport Science, even a caveman could do better
Again, I am sorry ESPN for the attack. I do love ESPN3 - great for football games.
