Sunday Supplement: Something Even Nerdier Than Charts

In desperate need of an offseason Eagles fix (beyond, of course, all the goodness here at IgglesBlog), I fired up a video of the NFC Championship Game loss to the Cardinals last week.  Without rehashing more of the game than we need to (though I'd argue that it's worth a second look -- despite the unfortunate result, it was a pretty crazy game), I'm going to awkwardly mention that there was a minor detail about the telecast that had been bothering me since January.

(Non-Eagles psychopaths are welcome to stop reading right here.)

You remember that deep ball that Greg Lewis dropped at the end of the first quarter?  Probably not, right?  It was the one where McNabb rolled out right and chucked the ball to Lewis running down the the far left sideline?  (It was a first-down play with 2:04 left in the quarter.)  Lewis got both hands on the ball, but couldn't hold on to it. 

Sure, it was a bummer that G-Lew dropped the ball, but I remember being more annoyed by Troy Aikman's analysis of the throw.  Usually Aikman is pretty fair to Donovan McNabb (full disclosure: I'm actually not a Troy Aikman hater -- he's way down my list of 90s Cowboys worthy of my vitriol), but on this play he made some noise about how McNabb had thrown the ball to the wrong shoulder.  What I remember thinking at the time was that that was a ridiculous comment -- McNabb had thrown the ball a country mile, Lewis had it in his hands, and we're going to complain about shoulders?  Seriously?

Well, through the wonders of video recordings and high-school geometry, I set about figuring out just how far McNabb had thrown the ball.  Since the ball traveled diagonally across the field, the actual distance of the throw should just be the Pythagorean theorem, right?  McNabb was standing on his own 17 when he threw the ball, and it hit Lewis at the Cardinals' 28: length equals 55 yards. 

Width might have been tricky, but McNabb and Lewis hooked me up by positioning themselves roughly the same distance to the right of the right hash mark and sideline, respectively, so I could cheat a bit and call it the distance from the sideline to the far hash, 29.75 yards.  And then, bing, bang, boom, 55 squared plus 29.75 squared, carry the one, we've got 62.5 yards.  Look, I even made a picture!

A few comments here:

(1) That's actually pretty far.  62 yards in the air -- across the field -- is a non-trivial distance.  I remember reading stories about the Denver Broncos in the 80s and how the backup QBs couldn't actually practice certain throws out of the playbook, because they weren't actually able to throw deep outs to the opposite sideline.  Those were the John Elway-only plays.  I imagine that there is a similar situation at Eagles practice. 

(2) Given that distance, quibbling about the shoulder seems a little silly.  Ding McNabb for not hitting Hank Baskett in stride on an intermediate crossing pattern, but 62 yards to the opposite sideline -- where the ball hits the receiver's hands -- doesn't seem legit.  Maybe we could have given Lewis a bit more grief for that one. 

(3) Oh sure, Derek is pretty detailed with his charts and graphs, but when has he ever done geometry?  WHEN?  And little diagrams?  Who says I've been slacking around here?

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While we're on the topic of extreme nerdiness, save your ten bucks and skip the Terminator movie.  Remember how bad the Indiana Jones movie from last summer was?  Yeah.  The Terminator TV show that just got cancelled was about 10x better than the movie.