The Importance Of Inertia In American Football

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In American Football, quarterbacks throw the ball on the major axis, spirally to pass the ball to a person in a long distance. The quarterbacks increase precision and accuracy as they throw spiral because of two reasons. As the ball rotates until it reaches to the receiver, the ball is able to go through the air, instead of going against and blocks wind, which means that it stops wind from affecting it better than it being thrown in normal ways. The ball can experience this due to the moment of inertia occurring from the rotating motion. As the quarterback throws the ball spirally, he or she gives the ball spin about an axis that makes a small angle with the long symmetry axis of the ball. The angular velocity w now has two components, one …show more content…

Therefore, we can derive that the moment of inertia of an object usually depends on the mass of the object and the mass distribution of an object. As the second situation, figure skater shows that the longer the distance from the axis is, the greater the moment of inertia would occur. As the moment of inertia increases, the figure skater will reduces his or her angular velocity and will be eventually stop rotating. Therefore, we could figure out that the moment of inertia is related to the velocity, which therefore relates to the distance from the axis of rotation. Moreover, as two situations above have shown different types of moment of inertia, as the football gets more intense from the quarterback, it would have more force, which would then affect the ball while traveling the air to reach the receiver. From this, we can suppose that the moment of inertia is related to force, which consists of mass. Since more force occurs greater moment of inertia, we can figure out that more mass would occur higher moment of inertia. According to Newton’s second law, Force consists of the multiplication of mass and acceleration, which shows clearly that moment of inertia is related to the mass of the