The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Look, one hand!
Gloves improving play on both sides of ball.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — One of the most infamous dropped passes in football history clanged off Dallas Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith as he lay in the end zone during Super Bowl XIII.
Poor Smith. Forty years ago, he had only his bare hands to try to pull in Roger Staubach’s low pass. Had he played in a more recent edition of the NFL playoffs, he almost certainly would have been wearing a pair of the sticky, silicone gloves that have transformed receivers’ mitts into virtual Spider-Man hands.
The technological advances on the skin of those gloves have been so profound that they now enable receivers to snare passes their forebears never dreamed of catching, and in making the seemingly impossible possible, they may be changing the way football is played.
The grippy polymer used on the new generation of gloves, said to be developed first by a Canadian wide receiver and a chemist in a Pakistan laboratory in 1999, is about 20 percent stickier than a human hand — according to a recent study by the MIT Sports Lab performed at the request of The New York Times.
The technology has made life easier for receivers at all levels, of course, and now it is rare for any player in search of a better grip — including quarterbacks, running backs and tight ends — not to make them part of his standard equipment. Even defenders have taken to wearing them.
“The gloves definitely help with the one-handed catches,” said Rasul Douglas, a cornerback for the Philadelphia Eagles who wears a Nike version. “You rarely see guys making one-handed catches without gloves on.”
For those who have not played football in the last 15 years, just touch a pair at a sporting goods store. It will be obvious why the gloves, now manufactured by several companies, are probably the most significant performance-related football equipment innovation since the advent of the cleat.
“There’s no long-term statistical data that I’ve seen,” said Rich McKay, the chief executive of the Atlanta Falcons and the chairman of the NFL’s competition committee. “But they definitely make some difference, there’s no doubt about that.”
When a catch is made, the naked eye often sees only hands grabbing a ball. But what is happening on the palms of a receiver’s gloves is far more complex: the scientific principle of polymer adhesion and the miracle of a molecular chain of silicon and oxygen that creates polysiloxanes — viscoelastic substances commonly known as silicone rubber. Silicone is used to make a wide range of products, including caulk, kitchen tools and Silly Putty. Receivers use it to make highlight-reel plays.
Dual properties
According to Sanat Kumar, a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University and a specialist in polymers, the sticky property exhibited in a viscoelastic medium arises because the material acts as both a solid and a liquid.
“It is macroscopically a solid,” Kumar explained of the silicone. “But at shorter, microscopic lengths, it is liquidlike.”
That liquidlike property makes it sticky. Imagine a tight spiral thrown onto a hard surface such as a road. It skips right off. Now, imagine the same ball chucked into a large puddle of honey. The honey makes the grab. That is because the silicone surface of the gloves is, at the microscopic level, a viscous, honeylike liquid, and when a football comes in contact with it, the ball stalls in it the way it would on the surface of a gooey liquid, like the honey. The ball must work to get through it.
Anette Hosoi, a co-director of the MIT Sports Lab and an associate dean of engineering at MIT, is an expert on the interface of soft materials. She and her students conducted experiments on a pair of blue Under Armour UA F6 gloves last week to quantify their tackiness, basically measuring the force required to pull a leather Wilson football over both the gloves and over a bare hand, in both dry and wet conditions.
The experiments were led by Sarah Fay, an MIT doctoral candidate, who determined the gloves had a coefficient of friction of 1.64 when dry, which is roughly 20 percent more grip force than that of a bare hand (1.37 CoF).
Fay also noted that statistically and perhaps surprisingly, there is no significant difference between the friction of a wet glove and a wet hand.
Looking over a pair of Under Armour gloves in her office near the Charles River, Hosoi said the key to their performance was how soft and deformable the silicone is, meaning it covers and adheres to the tiniest variations on the surface of the ball, enabling it to almost melt into them.
“Every time you get more deformable, you get a better adhesion,” Hosoi said after slipping on a pair and palming a leather football with her left hand.
But as any coach or Eagles fan knows, adhesion alone does not guarantee catches. As Douglas, the Eagles cornerback, said before last week’s loss to the New Orleans Saints, “There’s people with gloves on who are still dropping passes every game.”
‘You rarely see guys making onehanded catches without gloves on.’ Rasul Douglas, Philadelphia Eagles cornerback