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.*
Hurts' 600-Pound Squat is 'Irrelevant'
Brandt then brings up Hurts' ability to squat 600 pounds, asking if that has anything to do with the Eagles' Tush Push success.
"No. That is irrelevant in this play because he's airborne," Dr. Tyson said. "He's got two pushers here, one on each butt cheek. Hence the Tush Push.
"... Force equals the mass times acceleration. What that means is the bigger the mass, the bigger the force you will need to create the acceleration. The guys who are connected to the earth, their mass includes that of the earth. Because they're attached to the earth."
Brandt asks Dr. Tyson one more time if the Tush Push can be stopped.
"You know those stars that explode and nothing can stop them? We call them supernovas, we can see them across the universe," Dr. Tyson said. "That's how bright they are. A black hole when it forms forms and you're not stopping it. No known force in the universe can stop it. So, I'm happy to chalk this up as an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics. Manifest in this universe."
So what Dr. Tyson is saying is that while the Tush Push can't be stopped, it can be replicated if coaches and players consider the physics.
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