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 more in this episode of BrainStuff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Bogelbam Here. Imagine a fine afternoon in Denver, the
Mile High City. Behind quarterback Peyton Manning's explosive offensive, the
Denver Broncos of a mast to tend 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

(00:23):
up a good fight over the first half hour of gameplay.
Three seconds before halftime, the score is Tennessee Denver seventeen.
Enter Broncos kicker Matt Prator 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
end over end across the field. As a nervous crowd
holds its breadth, and then the place erupts with ease.

(00:46):
The ball sails through the yellow cross bar in Tennessee's
end zone. It's the longest completed field goal in NFL history,
a perfectly made sixty four yard drill for a metric friends,
that's about fifty eight meters. Perhaps emboldened by prators heroics,
the Bronchs go on to crush the Titans of the
second half, thus clinching a playoff berth. The game I
just described took place on December eight Today, prater sixty

(01:10):
four yard or still holds the all time distance record,
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 yard or there in
a feat that was matched by Sebastian Janikowski when his

(01:32):
Oakland Raiders came to town thirteen years later. But to
hear some sports fans tell it, those three kicks should
have asterix attached. The official 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. Of The runner up is Glendale, Arizona,
which is just one thousand feet or three hundred meters

(01:54):
above sea level. Denver's elevation does affect the sporting events
up there. When a football is kicked as Broncos 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

(02:17):
the numbers on eight different teams from cities that sit
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 one or
two thousand 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

(02:37):
traveled seventy point one yards that's sixty four meters on average.
Back in their respective home fields, the average kickoff distance
dropped by seven point three yards that's six point six meters.
To understand those numbers, will need to talk about air density. Pretend,
as I'm sure you want to, that you have a
jet back if you were to take off at sea

(02:57):
level and travel through Earth's atmosphere in a straight line up,
The density of the air around you would get lower
as your 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. Lessons and air molecules
are not exempt. The poll of Earth's gravity is more
strongly felt by molecules that are closer to the planet's

(03:20):
center at or below sea level. Gravitational attraction packs the
molecules 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 is only about
eighty two percent as dense as it is at sea level.

(03:42):
A bald kicked skyward in Denver will therefore encounter fewer
air 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

(04:06):
density air 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 Coors Field go
approximately five percent farther than they do at Fenway Park
in Boston. Yet kicking on the Broncos home turf won't

(04:29):
guarantee success for kickers or punters. Altitude reduces air density
and by extension, drag, but cold weather increases it, and
boy can Colorado get chili. Survey of NFL statistical records
found that in outdoor games played at temperatures of thirty
nine degrees faheit that's four degrees celsius or lower, field
goal accuracy drops by one point seven percent, while the

(04:51):
average punt length is about one yard shorter than normal.
These findings hold true throughout the league, so it's to
Matt Prador's credit that his record breaking field goal 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

(05:14):
the mecca 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 was written by Mark Mancini and

(05:34):
produced by Tyler Clang for I Heart Media and How
Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other
kick in topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works
dot com.