Newton's Football

October 14, 2013
In this collaboration, journalist St. John (The Billion Dollar Game and Clapton’s Guitar) and scientist Ramirez (Save Our Science) have taken scientific equations and theories and applied them to the “bone-crushing” sport of football. The authors have done a worthy job of combining popular science and sports into a work that features enough expertise on each topic to satisfy nerds and jocks alike. That means comparing the West Coast offense’s need for “quarterbacks to think like a computer” to Boolean algebra and its use of ones and zeros, and likening the no-huddle offense to chaos theory. The writers succeed in their task thanks to in-depth scientific knowledge, a wonderful grasp of football’s past and present, interviews with a wide array of experts, and witty prose (as when the authors ask, “How—on a granular level—do two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun turn into a future NFL Hall of Famer?”). While some chapters—like those devoted to figuring out which player Sir Isaac Newton would draft first or how kids should learn how to tackle—aren’t as successful at demonstrating the connection between science and football, they are, like the rest of this work, fun and thought-provoking, proving that football is a mind game as much as it is a ball game. Agents: (for Ramirez) Laura Wood, FinePrint Literary; (for St. John) Jason Allen Ashlock, Moveable Type Management.

November 1, 2013
Journalist St. John (Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, 2005, etc.) and former Yale engineering professor Ramirez (Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, 2013) use scientific principles to give a greater understanding of the spectacle of competitive violence that is American professional football. The authors' down-to-earth examples make for an unexpectedly engaging book, as they reveal the surprising fact that professional and college coaches of the sport's early years were themselves students of higher learning who designed the game as a way to find order in chaos, albeit by pummeling opponents. St. John and Ramirez boldly propose that legendary Green Bay Packers head coach--and former high school math teacher--Vince Lombardi was as much a man of science as Sir Isaac Newton and mathematician John Nash, of A Beautiful Mind fame. (Lombardi's film of his coaching philosophy, his "manifesto," was titled "The Science and Art of Football.") Throughout the book, the authors demonstrate the sport's intellectual underpinnings. As in meteorology, seemingly minor or random events--or changes in strategy--can determine outcomes in unexpected, far-reaching ways, as seen in the revolutionary "West Coast Offense" developed by former San Francisco 49ers head coach (and widely regarded offensive mastermind) Bill Walsh. The authors also show that the zone blitz is a perfect example of physicist Werner Heisenberg's uncertainly principle. In fact, many football fans are, perhaps unknowingly, familiar with chaos theory through the scheme of the no-huddle offense. Though some of the chapters could have been shortened and folded into others without weakening the premise, what makes this book so enjoyable is the authors' revealing of how academic disciplines such as Boolean algebra and paleontology are present in such a brutish sport--and it never comes across as a sleep-inducing college lecture. Both self-proclaimed geeks and the sports-averse can appreciate this "gridiron version of the scientific method."

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December 1, 2013
What prepared Vince Lombardi for phenomenal success in professional football? St. John and Ramirez believe it was the eight years Lombardi spent teaching high-school math and physics. For behind Lombardi's six NFL titles in the 1960s, the authors discern a brilliant application of Newtonian physics in the Green Bay Packers' famous power sweep and of probability theory in the Packers' run-oriented game plans. But Lombardi's storied career is but one gridiron setting in which readers discover hidden scientific and mathematical concepts. Readers will marvel, for instance, at how chaos theory connects an injury to a key player with the beginning of the West Coast offense. Just as amazing is the Boolean logic governing quarterback reads. Other analyses deploy the science of dynamic feedback to explain how adding a face mask to the helmet put players at greater risk of concussions, and combine the physics of pass-blocking with the thermodynamics of nutrition (and steroids?) to account for behemoth linemen. A delightfully improbable book putting science nerds and sports fans on the same page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)