Good Morning Football’s Kyle Brandt recently went on a quest to get to the bottom of the Philadelphia Eagles‘ infamous play, the “Tush Push.”
His so-called “quest” involved sitting down with astrophysicist and writer Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and breaking down the physics behind the rugby scrum.
While Dr. Tyson admitted that he doesn’t know how to stop he explained why it works so well.
“When the Eagles line up for the Tush Push, everybody knows what’s about to happen,” Dr. Tyson explains. “The Eagles have the advantage because they’re hiking. And no one on the [other team] can move until after the Eagles move. And so the Eagles get a quarter-second head start in momentum transfer. So the Eagles are already in motion. They are using earth as a launch point do their movement.
“In fact, if you run the math on this, every time the Eagles run this play, it slightly changes the rotation of the earth.”
Excuse me, what?
“If I’m on the opposing team, I want to jump over you,” he explains. “But you know what happens when I jump over you? You’re no longer connected to the earth.
Brandt chimes in, “So that’s a disadvantage?”
Dr. Tyson: “Yes! If you’re no longer connected to the earth, you have nothing to press against. And I know this because I used to wrestle.”
*Dr. Tyson proceeds to perform a wrestling move on Brandt to show that once a player is disconnected from Earth, they become weaker since they no longer can us the weight of the Earth as more leverage.*
