Lamar's passes wobble! Emergency!

Except – What is wobble, and where does it come from?



I have a FIVE-post introduction to this topic. That's right, 5 posts! We're gonna dig in to this.

Let's first look at this Sports Science segment from 2009 or '10, where they compare Drew Brees with the accuracy of Olympic archers:




They have Brees throw 10 passes at a target from 20 yards out. The idea is to see if Brees can hit the inner ring more often than Olympic archers can. Spoiler: Brees is perfect. Olympic archers hit the center about 20% of the time; Brees never misses it. (Of course, the archers are shooting from like 75 ft away, so there's that.

Anyway: the Sports Science guys also discuss wobble. In the vid you can see Brees' passes wobble at:
1:38
3:17
4:20
4:32
4:53 (entire action for throw #10)
7:18

At 6:53 they go into detail. Here's my transcription (might not be 100% right):
"Wobble occurs as the ball spins slightly off-axis. It's the small circle the nose traces in the air. Surprisingly, a little wobble is necessary to keep the ball on-target. And this is the amazing secret to Drew's accuracy. His passes have just the right amount of wobble. Three small wobbles for every five spins of the ball. Too much wobble is noticeable, when that small circle the nose makes gets too big."
They flat-out say that there is some "right amount of wobble". Some wobble is good! I don't have the necessary background in phsyics or aerodynamics or whatever to evaluate that claim. But I'm pretty confident about my rule of thumb, "if Brees does it than it must be right". They measured Brees' wobble at 3 per 5 revolutions.

I agree that many of Lamar's passes wobble "too much". But I don't think we can say there's a problem just on the basis of seeing SOME wobble. "Some" wobble is, well, somewhere between desirable and ok. Wobble all by itself seems not to be a problem.



Next up: our favorite YouTuber.