Patreon Exclusive: The Biggest Misconception in Football - Tom Brady Extended Interview
Added 2025-06-24 08:55:04 +0000 UTCDerek and Henry meet 7-time Superbowl winner, Tom Brady, to discuss the physics behind throwing a football.
Watch our video on YouTube for more about why even the GOAT Tom Brady can’t throw a perfect spiral - https://youtu.be/J3i3F2e4IYs
Comments
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed!
Veritasium
2025-06-26 06:03:54 +0000 UTCTerry, I usually agree with you, but I'm sorry, you are being a noodle this time! Your downward acoustic blocking hypothesis is incorrect because the dome would reflect crowd noise, thus _increasing_ total downward ambient sound, not decreasing it. New hypothesis: The acoustic information Brady receives comes from acoustic topology. The top of an open stadium acts as an absorbing "acoustic black box" surface that allows horizontal acoustics to show up more sharply. With this new hypothesis, the acoustic information Brady loses in domed stadiums is about the cross-field wind status between him and his target. The wording is tricky: What he calls a "vacuum" would be a loss of signals due to _too much_ ambient acoustic noise drowning it out.
Terry Bollinger
2025-06-24 15:58:30 +0000 UTCHidden acoustic science! 13:56 DM: "Why do you like being outdoors, as opposed to being in a dome?" TB: "I felt like my depth perception was a little better outside. I liked just the natural feel of the natural air. The dome always felt like a vacuum: Enclosed, tight. The sound was very tight." Given what a remarkably precise data collector this interview shows Tom Brady to be, folks curious about how he achieves maximum accuracy should not take his explicit mention of sound in the last sentence lightly. The ability of humans to acquire directional information from ambient acoustic sound -- the audio equivalent of white light -- is well established in, for example, the ability of some blind people to navigate bicycles over controlled routes without colliding with obstacles. Anyone can test this effect crudely by doing nothing more than opening your driver-side windows while driving down a residential lane with a few parked cars along the side. Your car acts like an acoustic lantern, lighting up each parked car as you drive by and creating a dramatic shift in returned ambient sound as you pass them. It sounds like ambient acoustics are part of how Tom Brady sizes up his surrounding environmental status and dynamics, even if he does not explicitly understand how he uses that acoustic information. The fact that he prefers open environments and refers to closed environments as feeling like "a vacuum" is an important clue to the nature of this additional information. In the dome, he loses some form of acoustic information that benefits his understanding of the environment. Given the absurdly slow speed of sound at these scales, the missing acoustics cannot directly involve the walls and dome roof. The acoustics he uses must be extremely local so they can traverse distances comparable to the extremely short distances sound covers during his fast reaction time. The need for extreme locality implies that he is detecting the absence of some form of local ambient noise that contributes to his understanding of the situation. This local absence would need to be a specific form of ambient noise, since both open and domed stadiums should provide plenty of that to the region immediately around Brady. These are, after all, American football games, not readings of Chaucer at the local library. Hypothesis: What's missing is ambient sound from above the stadium, which passes downward through layers of air and picks up some information about the state and dynamics of the air layers his pass must traverse to reach his target. My guess is that he's detecting differences in wind velocity at higher levels. Brady unconsciously uses this tiny bit of vertical-traversal acoustic data to assess the status of the air layers above ground level, giving him information on issues such as higher wind velocities above ground level. The dome shuts this sensor source down, forcing him to return to a more static "vacuum" assessment of the air layers above him, where he must assume their velocities to be identical to those at ground level. The irony is that even if this shutoff of information feels unsettling to Brady, the resulting default assumption of uniform (and presumably still) air layer velocities in domed stadiums may work better for targeting, since they reduce the number of parameters he must assess. His discomfort would instead arise from having a source of information important to him for 90% of situations suddenly disappear -- a "vacuum" of data. Few quarterbacks would be sufficiently aware of such details, even unconsciously, to notice such a difference. Most would accept the domes as "no wind" situations that make passes easier.
Terry Bollinger
2025-06-24 15:42:17 +0000 UTCDo you realize how often current and aspiring high school, college, and professional quarterbacks will play and replay this fantastic insight-filled interview? The generosity that Tom Brady and your team are showing to young athletes by making this training video easily available is off the charts. Thank you for doing this!
Terry Bollinger
2025-06-24 14:55:18 +0000 UTC
