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"  Every week during the football season, Peyton Manning is a six-foot-five, 235-pound science lesson. The future Hall of Famer has obvious skills but also a variety of not-so-obvious ones that have made him a legend\u2014skills best explained by someone with a Ph.D. So, in Newton&amp;#039;s Football: The Science Behind America&amp;#039;s Game, released this week, Yale scientist Ainissa Ramirez and I talked to top scientists and NFL players and coaches about the subtle physical and mental demands of one of the most demanding positions in sports. Quarterback is the most mentally demanding position in a demanding game, and drafting or signing the right man can make or break a team&amp;#039;s future. As a result, many of our inquiries delved into the science of what makes a great QB. Here&amp;#039;s what we found: The Prep Football players love to talk about about &amp;quot;reps.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s short for repetitions, the number of times a player will run through a play in practice. A pro quarterback will run about 11,000 reps in a season, which means that over Manning&amp;#039;s 20-year college and pro career, he&amp;#039;s done a staggering 200,000 reps. What&amp;#039;s overlooked about those reps is that Manning is really training his brain as much as his body. Yale neuroscientist Charles Greer explains that turning reps from a Thursday practice into a touchdown pass on Sunday is nothing more than brain science at work. Or, more specifically, a phenomenon called long-term potentiation. If you fire a synapse for the first time, he explains, it takes a certain amount of electrical energy. The next time you fire it? It takes less energy. That change is learning at its most granular level. And that&amp;#039;s what Manning&amp;#039;s brain is doing every day in practice, turning a series of studied, conscious movements into a neurological sub-routine that Manning can run autopilot. Which is very handy when a huge pass rusher is ready to send you crashing to the turf. The Play  How is Peyton Manning like a laptop? They&amp;#039;re both digital. In the old     days, a passer like Johnny Unitas would visualize the field in a holistic\u2014even analog\u2014way, scanning the field for an open receiver, not unlike the way you might see a play in a Thanksgiving Day pickup game. With bigger, faster players executing more complex defenses, giving the quarterback less time to throw and more opportunities to make a mistake, a modern quarterback like Manning takes a different, digital, approach, breaking down a pass play into smaller, binary segments. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re a musician you don&amp;#039;t think about Beethoven&amp;#039;s Ninth in its entirety when you&amp;#039;re playing it,&amp;quot; Greer says. &amp;quot;You just play one note at a time.&amp;quot; Manning does the same thing. Ken Anderson, a Super Bowl quarterback and former coach of Steelers star Ben Roethlisberger, explains that a modern NFL passer divides each pass play into a series of yes/no and if/then decisions. Here&amp;#039;s a sample scenario: Step One: Blitz or no blitz? If a cornerback or safety is blitzing, Manning throws the ball away. If not, he moves to step two. Step Two: Manning checks the coverage, and, depending on the positioning of the linebackers, he makes another binary choice: Throw right. Or, throw left. Step Three: Locate the primary receiver. Is he open? If so, throw the ball. If not, proceed to step four. Step Four: Find the secondary receiver. Is he open? If so, throw. If not, proceed to step five. Step Five: Find the third receiver. Is he open? If so, throw the ball. If not, proceed to step six. Step Six: As a last resort, find a running back or tight end just past the line of scrimmage. Throw the ball. Keep in mind, this all has to be done in about 3.5 seconds, and if Manning takes even a tick too long, the result is likely to be an unplanned meeting with an angry defensive end. This is pure information processing, and some players are better at it than other. This subtle ability to parse a complex environment into manageable pieces in a split second may be the difference between a perennial All-Pro, like Manning, and a washout, like cannon-armed Ryan Leaf, who was drafted just behind Manning in the 1998 draft and has been out of the league since 2002.  &amp;quot;The quarterback position is such a difficult position to evaluate because it&amp;#039;s part physical talent and part cerebral talent,&amp;quot; says Paraag Marathe, chief operating officer of the San Francisco 49ers. &amp;quot;The standard deviation in physical skill set is so small at the NFL level. But, mentally, there&amp;#039;s a bigger gap.&amp;quot; The Pass Manning has one of the best arms in the game, and his passes are a thing of beauty. But no matter what you&amp;#039;ve heard, they are not perfect spirals. According to William Rae, a SUNY Buffalo professor who is the world&amp;#039;s leading expert on the path of the ball, there&amp;#039;s no such thing. Even a perfect pass will have a little bit of wobble.  Watching his own slow-motion footage and studying data from his own instrumented balls, Rae began his research by confirming that a football thrown with little or no spin will do a belly flop once some air gets under the nose. &amp;quot;How do you convince this thing that it ought to continue pointing into the wind?&amp;quot; Rae asks rhetorically. &amp;quot;The answer is spin.&amp;quot; Or, more accurately, gyroscopic torque. Gyroscopic torque keeps the ball stable in flight, just the way the gyroscopic force of a bicycle wheel keeps your mountain bike upright when you&amp;#039;re out for a ride. If you spin a toy gyroscope, lay it on its side, and let gravity drop the nose, the gyroscopic torque will move the gyroscope at a right angle, gently resisting the force of gravity. With a football in full flight, however, this reaction sets in motion a complex dance between the forces of gravity pulling the ball down and the gyroscopic torque resisting that pull. As the ball spins, there&amp;#039;s a cycle of deflection\u2014first slightly to the right, then down a bit, then to the left, then up, and then to the right again. The end result is that the spin axis traces out a cone-shaped path\u2014which is to say, a spiral with the slightest bit of wobble. Just the way Manning throws it. Even the gyroscopic torque of a ball spinning 60 times a second wouldn&amp;#039;t be strong enough to stabilize the ball indefinitely, Rae says. Imagine Manning throwing a football off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Eventually\u2014after 10 seconds or so\u2014the cone would get bigger, the wobble more profound, and the ball would start tumbling end over end like a punt. In an actual game, that&amp;#039;s a moot point because even the longest pass has a hang time of only 4 seconds, which isn&amp;#039;t enough time for the flight of the spiral to collapse completely. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a9748/the-science-of-peyton-manning-16184159/>