Tom Brady provided viewers with a well-received lesson about football and physics during Fox’s broadcast of the Philadelphia Eagles vs. San Francisco 49ers wild-card game.
Brady’s teaching moment came midway through the third quarter of the Jan. 11 playoff contest, during which a steady wind was blowing. There were gusts up to 36 mph during the contest, and it was causing issues for quarterbacks Brock Purdy and Jalen Hurts.
Brady explained exactly why the wind was making passing difficult, relying on his 23 years of NFL experience to detail the difficulties of throwing in windy conditions.
‘What you see, and I talk about the point of the ball a lot, you see it from; I’ll show it to you from this angle,’ Brady said, while showing play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt and the Fox cameras him gripping a football. ‘This is kind of like a neutral plane. This is when the point’s slightly down. When you’re throwing it into the wind, it has to be neutral. If the point of the ball is up, any wind friction’s gonna push that ball up over the top.’
‘So, as a quarterback, you don’t really like that ‘U’ throw underneath, because naturally, that’s going to point the tip of the ball up,’ Brady continued. ‘You like more of a ‘C’ or an inverse, a reverse ‘C’. That’s how you kind of control the point of the ball, and then you can kind of just snap it off as you throw it.’
‘But in these windy conditions, you can’t be underneath the ball,’ Brady added. ‘There’s too much wind surface of the ball to knock it off its path.’
Brady’s breakdown drew universal acclaim from NFL fans and analysts alike. It was demonstrative of the knowledge he brings to the booth as a seven-time Super Bowl champion and, inarguably, the greatest quarterback in league history.
Fox will continue to reap the benefits of the 48-year-old’s expertise. He signed a 10-year deal with the network and has shown continued improvement while acclimating nicely to the booth during his second season as an NFL broadcaster.