John Allen St - Newtons football the science behind Americas game

P layers are ant-like entities, said Stephen Wolfram, straining for an analogy. Imagine that they have simple rules for interacting with each otherlike, if two things are heading straight at each other, they both avoid on the left.

He paused for a moment.

Even though the rules for the entities are quite simple, the aggregate behavior can be quite complicated.

Wolfram stopped himself.

Im sorry, I dont know anything about football, he admitted.

The MacArthur Fellow had been saying this over and over again in slightly different ways for half an hour. But the truth of it snapped into sharp focus when he started comparing Logan Mankins to a bug.

It was a typically atypical day for Team Newton. Throughout our research for this book, we would set up our conference call magic, roll tape on the Olympus digital recorder with the Mickey Mouseear microphones, and talk football with some of the smartest and most accomplished people in the world. One afternoon it was Jerry Rice, who caught a football better than anyone ever. The next it was Lorna Gibson, who can tell you everything youd ever want to know about why woodpeckers dont get concussions.

It was a great gig.

But the best day of all was when we talked to Wolfram and Sam Wyche.

Wolfram might not be a household name, but in the scientific world hes Tom Brady; his brainpower is matched only by his ambition. His projects range from a cool book that tries to explain literally everything to even cooler software that will do your algebra homework for you. Talking science with Wolfram is as close as you can get to hearing Einstein riff about relativity. But for all his fame, Wolfram is passionate about helping ordinary people use scientific tools to understand the world, which is why he agreed to give us a few minutes on a January evening, eight hours after we hung up with Wyche.

Heres what you need to know about Sam Wyche. The former Cincinnati Bengals coach once stopped a full-fledged stadium riot dead in its tracks with nine words: You dont live in Cleveland, you live in Cincinnati! It was the sort of thing that happens in movies, except that this was real life and those were real glass bottles.

That morning last January, we had called Wyche, hoping to talk about Bill Walsh. We were searching for insight on the West Coast offense, the passing attack that revolutionized football in the 1980s. But Walsh himself had passed away in 2007, so we were seeking out his colleagues to fill in the gaps.

Having played backup quarterback for the Bengals and coached the passing game for the 49ers, Wyche had ridden shotgun on one of the most remarkable journeys in football history, a long strange trip from Cincinnati to the Super Bowl. While Walsh tinkered, Wyche watched.

Full of homespun humor and down-home charm, Wyche cordially answered our questions. But he had another story he was itching to tell: his own. So after he finished explaining Walshs pass progressions in loving detail, Wyche started in on the tale of his own slightly crazy spin on the West Coast offense: the no-huddle.

We were on the verge of interrupting him, because we had another interview scheduled in five minutes. But Wyche is such an engaging storyteller that we simply shut up and listened as he explained why he had decided to toss a centurys worth of conventional wisdom out the window. It was a great story, but we didnt know what to do with it. Not yet, anyway.

Our conversation with Wolfram that evening quickly settled into a feedback loop. He would apologize for not knowing anything about football. We would assure him that it didnt matter. He would apologize yet again. We were a little surprised to be offering reassurance to a certified genius, but

Then suddenly Wolfram forgot about football and started talking about chaos theory. It changed everything. It is a subtle business, he explained, in his lilting English accent. The knob of the chaos theory idea is the dependence on the initial conditions. Change the initial conditions, and the outcomes diverge exponentially. That is the core of chaos theory.

In this lightbulb moment we each realized that Wolfram was, however improbably, describing what Wyches innovative game plan had brought to the football field. The no-huddle offense was chaos theory at work.

We understood that Newtons Football would be a book not about football or about science but about ideas. Ideas coming from the most unexpected sources, converging in the most delightful ways.

On the surface, Wyche and Wolfram are as different as two people can be, the cosmic Odd Couple. During our conversation, for example, each of them talked about how to tell when a football player is getting tired.

Wolfram immediately reached into his bag of high-tech tricks. It is now possible with image processing to look at your face and see the tiny bits of color every time the blood is being oxygenated as it is being pumped through your arteries. You can measure it with an iPad app, Wolfram explained enthusiastically. It will measure your heart rate by looking at you. There is a whole area of science devoted to determining what a human is thinking from outside. You watch the micro-expressions or, if you could measure it, you look at the skin conductance, or something like this.

Wyche, on the other hand, suggested you look at the guys thumbs. (Its an old quarterbacks trick that we let him explain fully in .)

But for all of their differences, Wyche and Wolfram are brothers from another mother. They share an innate curiosity and the intellectual courage to look beyond the conventional wisdom. Both ask Why not?

At least when theyre not stopping riots or comparing football players to insects.