BrainStuff Classics: Do Footballs Fly Farther in Denver?

Denver's Mile High Stadium sits a full mile above sea level -- is that distance really enough to make a difference in the air compared with other stadiums, and thus in how footballs fly there? Learn about football physics in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/physics-and-football-denvers-altitude-affect-field-goals.htm

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren vogelbomb here with a classic episode for all you
fall football fanatics, with a crossover into the physics of
field goalflight. In this one, we're talking about how the
high altitude of certain NFL stadiums can actually make a
difference and how far a ball will go. Hey Brainstuff,

(00:26):
Lauren vogelbaumb here. Imagine a fine afternoon in Denver, the
Mile High City. Behind quarterback Peyton Manning's explosive offensive, the
Denver Broncos have a massed to ten to two record.
Today they're hosting the Tennessee Titans, a squad that's lost
three of its past four games. The Titans have put
up a good fight over the first half hour of gameplay.
Three seconds before halftime, the score is Tennessee twenty one,

(00:49):
Denver seventeen. Enter Broncos kicker Matt Prater trotting out to
the Denver forty six yard line. He readies himself for
the play of his life. A mighty kick sends the
ball soaring and end across the field as a nervous
crowd holds its breadth and then the place erupts with ease,
the ball sales through the yellow cross bar in Tennessee's
end zone. It's the longest completed field goal in NFL history,

(01:12):
a perfectly made sixty four yard drill a ferrometric friends
that's about fifty eight meters. Perhaps emboldened by Prayder's heroics,
the Broncos go on to crush the Titans of the
second half, thus clinching a playoff berth. The game I
just described took place on December eighth, twenty thirteen. Today,
Prayder's sixty four yarders still holds the all time distance record,

(01:32):
although his accomplishment has never been bested. Jaw Dropping football
kicks are nothing new in the Rocky Mountains. Three of
the five longest field goals that the NFL has ever
seen were made in Denver's Mile High Stadium. Bronco's great
Jason Elam nailed a sixty three yarder there in nineteen
ninety eight, a feat that was matched by Sebastian Jankowski
when his Oakland Raiders came to town thirteen years later.

(01:55):
But to hear some sports fans tell it, those three
kicks should have asterisks attached. Elevation of Colorado's capital is
exactly one mile that's one thousand, six hundred and nine
meters above sea level. No other NFL city sits anywhere
close to that altitude. The runner up is Glendale, Arizona,
which is just one thousand feet or three hundred meters
above sea level. Denver's elevation does affect the sporting events

(02:18):
up there. When a football is kicked at Bronco's home game,
it's apt to cover more distance than it would in
lower elevations. And this doesn't just affect three point field goals.
Kickoffs tend to go farther as well. There's a book
called Football Physics, the Science of the Game by one
University of Nebraska professor Timothy Gay. For it, he ran
the numbers on eight different teams from cities that sit

(02:39):
more or less at sea level, like the Miami Dolphins
and the New England Patriots, that played at least one
road game in Denver during the two thousand and one
or two thousand and two seasons. He found that in
those two years, the visiting kickers from low elevation towns
enjoyed some great numbers when they went to Denver up
in Colorado. Their kickoffs traveled seventy point one yards that's
sixty four meters on average. Back in their respective home fields,

(03:02):
the average kickoff distance dropped by seven point three yards
that's six point six meters. To understand those numbers, we'll
need to talk about air density. Pretend, as I'm sure
you want to, that you have a jet pack. If
you were to take off at sea level and travel
through Earth's atmosphere in a straight line up, the density
of the air around you would get lower as your

(03:23):
altitude increased. This is due to a universal law. As
the distance between two objects grows, the gravitational pull that
they exert on each other lessens, and air molecules are
not exempt. The pull of Earth's gravity is more strongly
felt by molecules that are closer to the planet's center
at or below sea level. Gravitational attraction packs the molecules

(03:44):
tightly together, and the weight of the molecules sitting higher
up in the atmosphere really bears down on the ones
occupying low elevations. In consequence, the air itself grows denser
the closer you get to the surface. Way up in
the mile high city, the air's only about eighty two
percent as dense as it is at sea level. A
ball kicked skyward in Denver will therefore encounter fewer air

(04:05):
molecules than it would in Miami. That's important to note
because air molecules create drag. Drag is a force that
pushes against solid bodies as they travel through fluids or gases.
A punted or kicked football will run headlong into a
steady barrage of air molecules. Their combined drag will slow
it down, sometimes dramatically. But remember, in low density air

(04:26):
molecules are fewer and farther between. Therefore, footballs can and
often do, encounter less drag in Denver. Denver's altitude impacts
baseball as well. A physicist and Red Sox fan Alan
Nathan reports that flyballs at cors Field go approximately five
percent farther than they do at Fenway Park in Boston.
Yet kicking on the Broncos home turf won't guarantee success

(04:49):
for kickers or punters. Altitude reduces air density and by extension, drag,
but cold weather increases it, and boy, can Colorado get chili.
A twenty eleven survey of NFL statistical records found that
in outdoor games played at temperatures of thirty nine degrees
fahrenheit that's four degrees celsius or lower. Field goal accuracy
drops by one point seven percent, while the average punt

(05:11):
length is about one yard shorter than normal. These findings
hold true throughout the league. So it's to Matt Prater's
credit that his record breaking field goals split the uprights
from sixty four yards out even though Denver's temperature had
fallen to just fourteen degrees fahrenheit that's negative ten celsius
at the time. Whatever the weather, kicking specialists need to
be on guard against complacency. Denver's reputation as the mecca

(05:34):
of ultra long field goals is well established across the league.
According to players, that mile high mystique can trick visiting
kickers into overestimating their abilities. We could say that when
in doubt, always air on the side of caution. Today's
episode is based on the article Physics and Football, How

(05:56):
Denver's altitude affects field goals on HowStuffWorks dot Com. Written
I'm Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in
partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang,
four more podcasts, My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.