Post created by: Christian
In tonight’s Thursday Night Football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Brown, there was a lot of physical play but very minimal hits that I would consider brutal or “hit stick” hits. Aside from the brawl that occurred at the end of the game. Watching this game made me reminisce about the way football was played in the past. The hard-hitting, helmet to helmet, spine crunching football that was played in the last decade. The type of football that has riddled so many of their players with CTE. This got me thinking about a hit I recently saw on YouTube. A hit by Ike Turner on Pat White. I wanted to calculate this collision between Ike and Pat and determine rather it was elastic or inelastic. I found the mass of each player through ESPN's database, along with their velocities (by taking each players 40 yard dash time and assuming that each player was running at this pace before the collision) prior to the collision and was able to determine that the initial kinetic energy between the two players was 759 joules, and the final kinetic energy between the two players was 277 joules. The kinetic energy between the two players was not conserved and because of this, we can determine that the collision was an inelastic one. The biggest reason for the drastic change between the initial and final kinetic energies was the huge difference between the initial and final velocities.
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