In this week’s episode, both our storytellers share stories about the science-y side of sports and physical recreation.
Part 1: Daniel Engber risks derailing his PhD by constant daydreaming, until his neuroscience research gives him an idea that will revolutionize the NBA.
Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate.com and Popular Science, and a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He has appeared on Radiolab, All Things Considered and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and received the National Academies of Science Communication Award in 2012 and the Sex-Positive Journalism Award in 2008. His work has been anthologized in The Best of Technology Writing and The Best of Slate.
Part 2: Doomed to be the waterboy after tearing his ACL, engineering student Baratunde Cola is determined to make it back to his college's football team.
Bara Cola is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Georgia Tech, and founder and president of Carbice Nanotechnologies, Inc. He researches thermal transport and energy conversion in nanostructured materials, and is actively involved in the commercialization of his work, currently to cool electronics better. His work in nanotechnology, energy, and outreach to high school art and science teachers and students has been recognized with awards from President Obama and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He played college football when he was younger.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
So the science of sports. I'm not particularly good at sports, but I am particularly bad at science. I was a grad student in neuroscience. I was a particularly bad grad student in neuroscience studying the neuroscience of motor control in humans and in cats. The reason I was bad or one of the reasons I was bad is that I was kind of a daydreamer.
I know it's true that there are many great scientists, Nobel prize‑winning scientists who are daydreamers. I read once that Alexander Fleming would take breaks from doing his research and he would take this wire metal loop and he'd drag it through microbes that bloom different colors and smear it on agar plates. He'd make these multi‑colored paintings in Petri dishes.
Then he found this wonderful pigment one day, this brilliant, blue‑green fungus that was Penicillium. But I was not that kind of daydreamer. I was like distractible, didn't do his work, did a lot of surfing the web when he should have been doing experiments. That kind of thing.
One day, when I was in the lab, I was kind of daydreaming about something that happened the night before. The night before, I had gone to Oakland to see a basketball game. I'd seen the Golden State Warriors game and I noticed in the game that whenever one of the opposing players was shooting a free throw, the people in the stands behind the Golden State backboard would be waving their arms like this trying to distract the shooter. they'd be waving these pieces of Styrofoam, these Styrofoam noodles they called wiggle sticks that they hand out for just this purpose.
It's not like I didn't know that this happened. It's just this was the first time I thought about it. I'd done enough experiments on hand-eye coordination or eye coordination to know that this was just like a terrible, terrible idea. I mean just the worst idea. Because if you do this, you're making all this motion in all different directions and it'll sort of cancel out and just turn into white noise.
And if the brain is good at one thing, it's separating signal from noise and just ignoring all of that. So I had this sense that this was just a miserable way to do it.
And I was in the lab and I was surfing and doing whatever, other than my work, and I started looking up basketball stats. I figured if I looked up on NBA.com free throw percentages for different teams while at home and on the road and compared them, I could figure out if it really worked. Because if all those pom-poms and wiggle sticks and all that stuff works, then teams should shoot better at home than on the road.
But in fact, if you look across the whole league, teams shoot exactly the same at home and on the road to within like one‑twentieth of 1%. So this was proof, to me at least, that these things don't work. They don't work at all. They emphatically don't work.
So naturally, I started thinking about whether there's something that would work, whether there was like a scientifically valid way to distract free throw shooters.
As it happens, a paper had just been published in my subfield about targeted reaching movements against a field of coherent motion. Basically, it was just what happens if you try to reach for something and the world in front of you kind of slides to one side. And what happens, it turns out, is that it's sort of intuitive. But if the world slides to one side, you interpret it unconsciously as you're moving the other way and your brain makes a very quick correction for that. It might only be a millimeter.
But it occurred to me that even a tiny correction would be enough to throw off one of these very precise NBA shooters and this could really work in the NBA.
And so I said to myself like that is a fantastic idea. That is really amazing. You are amazing. And I had this whole conversation about that.
Then I was like I need to tell someone about my amazing idea and I need to tell someone in the NBA.
So then I just had to figure out who in the NBA to tell. Actually, there was a natural choice. I thought I'm going to tell the Dallas Mavericks. And why did I choose the Dallas Mavericks? I chose the Dallas Mavericks because they're owned by Mark Cuban.
You may know who Mark Cuban is. If you don't, he's just like a total weirdo. He's much younger than most NBA owners. He's like a self‑made tech billionaire. He has millions of Twitter followers. He has written children's books. He's done pro wrestling. I mean like he's been in the ring doing like the camel clutch and everything. He's sort of like a little bit of a 9/11 truther. He's like super weird.
He owns the Mavericks and he kind of is a maverick. Even better than that, his email address is online. It's like anyone can find his email address. I'm telling you. You can write it down. It's mark.cuban@dallasmavs.com. Do what I did. Email Mark Cuban.
So I went home and I sat down. I started emailing Mark Cuban and I laid out the whole thing. I said here's the stats, home and away. The wiggle sticks don't do anything. What you need is a wiggle stick conductor. You need someone who can lead the people, who can take all of their raw, moron, hand‑waving energy and harness it and focus it into a laser and then just shine that laser into the opposing player's eye.
I sent it off and I started making dinner. About half an hour later, I heard a ping on my computer. I went and I checked my inbox and there was an email from mark.cuban@dallasmavs.com. And I thought, that's probably one of his army of flunkies or something.
But I opened it up and it really was from Mark. I printed out the email so I could read it to you, and also because it's a cherished possession.
Okay.
“It could work.” That's how he started the email. He just gets right into it. He says, “It could work. The conductor is a great idea. As long as no one in the NBA is told, I'm happy to try it. What other ideas do you have? I love using science to gain an advantage. It's Mavs time!”
I was really excited about this email, as you can imagine. Especially I love the way he signed off.
I later discovered this was like an automatic email sign‑off on his email program, but, at the time, I liked indulging the fantasy that he was just so excited. He was just typing his message to me and at that end, he's just like, “It's Mavs time!” And he just hit send and was like, “Yeah!”
But I also really liked the fact that he had said, I don't know if you caught it, he said, “What other ideas do you have?”
What other ideas did I have? What other ideas did I have? I actually had no other ideas, but it seemed to me that I could have other ideas if I thought of other ideas. Then I could present those ideas to Mark Cuban and he could put those ideas into practice and we could get a whole thing going where he was the owner and I was like the guy with ideas and we would sort of be partners. The more I thought about it, it just seemed natural. I'd be like a neuroscience consultant to the National Basketball Association.
And why not? It seemed like Mark and I had kind of a lot in common. We were both from the East Coast, both descended from Russian Jews, we both love science, we both love using science to gain an advantage, as he pointed out in his email. He was like an eccentric billionaire and I was like an eccentric thousandaire and we could just work together to do something.
So I wrote back right away. I was like, “Mark, I just want you to know I don't think this is against the rules at all. I looked in the NBA rule book. It seems fine.”
And he wrote me back right away. It was like we were basically on I'm. I have that email too.
“I don't want other teams to catch on or have the league ban it,” he said, “but we will try to get everyone waving in unison starting tomorrow. It's Mavs time!”
I was so excited. You have to understand. I had spent like weeks and months of my life doing these experiments in a basement just to get like an ounce of data to publish in an obscure journal about like cats reaching for things. Now, in less than 24 hours, Mark Cuban was going to take my idea for basketball and he was going to put it live in front of tens of thousands of people at the American Airlines Arena or hundreds of thousands of people or however many people were watching.
I was like this is my Alexander Fleming moment. This is my penicillin. This, this is a real thing. This is science.
And sure enough, they played the Celtics the next night. I couldn't watch that game. It wasn't nationally televised. But the next day in the lab I checked the box scores. And they had done the idea, as far as I knew, and the Celtics only shot 60% from the line. That may sound pretty good but it's significantly lower than league average and that kind of thing makes a difference.
And the next game was against the Lakers and that game was nationally televised. So I got some friends together and we went out to a sports bar. They had NBC on and we were watching the game. In the first quarter, Kobe Bryant gets fouled and he goes to the line. And they do this like reverse angle, so you're seeing from behind him and you see behind the backboard. All the Mavericks fans are waving in unison.
In fact, so the Mavericks have this like costume mascot troupe called the Funslingers. And there's a Funslinger and he's got this sign, a white sign with red arrows and he's leading people and waving their arms left to right.
I'm like, “Wow, it's really happening.”
And Kobe takes a dribble and he shoots, and he just totally bricks the shot. I was like, “This is working. I'm in Kobe's head. It's fucking Mavs time.”
And so he hit the next shot, but I was still pretty into it. And then other Lakers came to the line and they made their shots. By the end of the game, the Lakers had actually shot just about league average, so something was off. I did notice that the fans were kind of like this and then they were like this and then they'd get bored and kind of be like this. It just seemed like it wasn't working perfectly.
So I thought I need to get in touch with Mark. He wants more of my ideas. So I wrote Mark and I said, “Okay, I've got another idea. You need to upgrade your wiggle stick. That's the problem. This is a technology problem.”
And I proposed some, in retrospect, not a very good plan, but I was like, “You could take the wiggle stick and you could put like an LED light in it and a plastic disc hanging on a swivel mount with a catch.” I still think this is sort of a good idea but, anyway, if everyone is waving this thing, you can design it in such a way that it'll only show the light if they're pulling the sticks in one direction. So they could do whatever they want and Kobe would see like a field of red lights moving in one direction.
So I write him this like 8,000‑word email about this and I'm like, “It'll be really cheap. I'll send you blueprints.” And he doesn't write back.
The next day, I get a phone call and it's from a guy named Matt. Now, Matt is the Dallas Mavericks’ VP of Marketing and Communications. Matt, first of all, thanks me for my enthusiasm. Then he tells me that, technically speaking, what I've suggested is totally against the rules and would merit massive fines if they ever did it.
And he tells me about other problems too. He says they're having personnel problems. He says, “The Funslingers aren't super into the idea. Mark Cuban likes it but they're not always doing it.” And he was telling me about this kid‑friendly horse character who keeps deserting his post and like going up to the Dr. Pepper Club to do children's birthday parties.
And he's just like, “You know, we're still doing it but calm down,” basically. So I say okay.
The next game is against the Pacers and, just like the Lakers, the Pacers shot exactly league average and I had a bad feeling. This whole thing with Matt getting in touch with me just seemed like a bad sign.
But I emailed Mark again, as I was doing on a regular basis at that point, and he wrote back. But this time, he didn't write back just to me as he had before. He wrote back and he cc'd Matt, and he cc'd several other people I'd never heard of in the Mavericks organization. This is the third and final email from him.
He said, “Dan, it failed miserably last night. Didn't work at all. I think our early success was random. It's Mavs time!”
With that, I realized that my experiment in the NBA was pretty much over. In fact, it was over and, like many other experiments I'd run, it was a failure.
I did end up writing a sort of an essay or an op-ed about this experience and my idea for Slate.com and my editor at Slate really did like the story. He actually ended up sending me an email that sort of echoed the first email from Mark Cuban. He said, “What other ideas do you have?”
By that summer, I was writing regularly for Slate and I ended up dropping out of grad school. In fact, that experiment in the NBA was so bad, was such a failure that it pushed me out of science altogether and into journalism.
But there is one little post script, which is a few months after this, I ran into a guy. I met a guy who's from Dallas who is a pretty serious Mavericks fan. I thought, “Perfect guy to tell this story to.”
So I told him the whole thing and I told him how Mark Cuban had said it failed miserably and all that. And he said, “Well, that's ridiculous, because I was just at a Mavericks game and they're still doing it. They're totally doing your idea. The Funslingers are out there. Like even the kid‑friendly horse character is involved now. He's on board.”
At first, I was really annoyed. I was like, “I don't believe it. Whatever.” And then I thought, “No, it makes perfect sense, because Mark Cuban is a really smart guy. He knew this was against the rules, so he doesn't want me blabbing about it on Slate.com or whatever. But he also knows that you can't draw any conclusions from a small sample size of three games. He's going to keep this experiment going. There's like this data set out there of I don't know how many games the Mavericks did it for. I don't know what the shooting percentages were. This is stuff I want to know.
So last week, thinking back on this, I wrote Mark Cuban again. This is the first time I've reached out to Mark, my old friend, in ten years. And I said, “What happened with this thing?” But I am sorry to report, this time, he didn't write back.
Thank you.
Part 2
I grew up in Pensacola, Florida where hall of fame football players are born. At eight years old, I was a legend. Known for carrying three boys on my back, ten yards for a score and touchdown. And my pants were falling down in the process.
But thanks to my dad, a mechanical engineer, I also liked math and science. He even put a whiteboard in my room in middle school with a daily algebra challenge.
Because I was motivated to be the best at academics and football, I chose to go to Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt competed in the SCC with the kings of college football and they were known for tough academics.
I went to Vanderbilt as a freshman and I joined the football team as a walk‑-on offensive lineman, which, despite my status as an all‑star in my hometown, meant that they really didn't want me on the team so they didn't offer me a scholarship. But I was okay with this because I had a partial engineering scholarship and some savings, but I really needed that athletic scholarship to afford my sophomore year.
My first semester at Vanderbilt kicked my butt. It was so different from what I was used to. I got a little bit better my second semester. My grades started to improve and I rebuilt my body into what a college football player was supposed to look like. My chest was finally sticking out further than my stomach.
By the time spring football practice came around and was ending, I was even optimistic about earning a scholarship.
The day after spring football practice ended, I went to play basketball with a couple of teammates. It was also the day before my big meeting with a coach to discuss the scholarship so I was nervous. But basketball helped me to relax. It was competitive that day and my new athletic body was flying around making plays.
On one play, I flew up above the rim for a rebound. And when I came down, I landed on someone's foot and hit the ground for probably the third or fourth time that game. But this time I didn't get up. I was on the ground in a different type of pain and on the way down I heard a pop in my knee.
I brushed the pain and the pop off when I finally got up. I convinced myself that it was just a sprain. I had done that before.
But I hobbled slowly over to see the team doctors and, when I got there, their tests revealed that I tore my anterior cruciate ligament ACL. I really didn't know where that was in my knee, but what I heard clearly was that it was going to require major surgery and a year of rehab before I could return to football.
I tried to be optimistic but my eyes were red holding back tears. And if this wasn't enough, then they say, “Son, we can't cover your expenses because you're a walk‑on.”
I had just turned 18. I was just getting over a disappointing first semester and, now, my chance at a scholarship was gone. I added to my family's financial burden and I lost control of my life. I didn't have a plan for this.
I came back to Vanderbilt my sophomore year despite financial difficulties and I took a new job as an assistant equipment manager for the football team. Now, I had to swallow my pride for this job because it kept me close to my teammates that were doing what I was supposed to be doing. At the same time, I had to stomach jokes from some of them inspired by Adam Sandler's movie The Water Boy that was out at that time.
“Hey, water boy, bring me some water,” they'd say, but, clearly, I was an equipment manager not a water boy. Idiots.
I picked up research that semester as well with one of my favorite professors. We developed code for engineering software and I found the work to be surprisingly therapeutic. But I was eager to get back on the field and, that summer, I became a monster in the weight room. I was curling as much as 100 pounds with each arm and I was in the best shape of my life.
My junior year, I came back. I took out loans and I was finally ready to go. I switched to a new position, fullback, because I thought it gave me a better chance to play, but my plan was still not working. I only got to play in practice. The coach just wasn't giving me a shot to do what I knew I could do.
In practice on this one play, I went out for a pass and when I made a turn, the defender came up and hit me, which was usual, but this time I got caught in an awkward position during my turn and my repaired knee gave way and I was on the ground. I couldn't believe it.
I knew at this point that this time, my football career was over.
In the spring of my junior year, I found comfort in research again. That summer, I took a position converting waste heat to electricity with nanostructured diamond. The project and the professor leading it got me excited about the prospects of nanotechnology. This professor could sell it. Plus, he was a former college athlete so we connected.
By the end of the summer, I could see myself leading a nanotechnology company one day and possibly going on to grad school to learn more about it. But I could barely afford to finish undergrad, so the thought of more school at that point was just too much.
My senior year, I continued research and I also went back to the football equipment staff, but I got a promotion. I was the head equipment manager. But this time, there was no hope in me going back to football so the job made me feel like a loser.
Don't get me wrong. I appreciated the job because I needed it to finish school and I worked with great people, but the job just reminded me of my failed goals and it was so painful.
Near the end of that season, the football coach got fired, which happens at big time sports when you don't perform. I was sitting in the equipment room when my boss came in to tell me the news. The equipment room was a social gathering place, a type of place where news like that traveled first.
But I didn't care who the new coach was. My playing days were over and I was graduating in the spring, but I looked him up anyway. I noticed that his offense featured a fullback, my position. And that the prior coach didn't really use a fullback and I thought, “Who would fill this role?”
Now, my knee was feeling okay and I was in good shape. But the thought of me going back after what I had been through was crazy. But the thought lingered in my mind.
Oh, it was trouble, but what did I have to lose? My dream was calling. Plus, if I broke my knee again, it could be fixed.
It's hard for me to explain to you what the face of a new coach looks like when the head equipment manager comes to his office and says, “I want to play now.” Following that with, “Oh, and I'm recovering from two ACLs,” probably didn't help.
But I pushed my body to the limits in winter conditioning. I never stopped lifting weights and I was actually one of the strongest guys on the team at the time, but my coordination and agility was hard to get back. The coaches didn't give me a pass for that so some of them tried to run me off.
I'd like to say that, at some point, I was given a shot at a great comeback story, like Rudy. He didn't come back but…
When spring practice started, the coaches listed me fifth, last at fullback. I was even behind two other walk‑ons and one of these guys was thinner than one of my legs. What a nightmare this was for me.
The first four days of practice, I was virtually a spectator and I didn't see the prospects for this changing anytime soon. And it occurred to me that despite my efforts, I might be wasting my time and be better off salvaging my chance to find a job after graduation.
But I gave it one last shot and I talked to the coach after practice. I spoke frankly of my circumstances and I asked for my chance. To his credit, he gave it to me.
He said, “I'll give you one play.”
My role as fullback on this play was to lead the ball carrier through the line and make the key block for a successful play. Despite getting no reps in practice, I was ready for this because the play required precise footsteps and footwork and I had practiced in front of my mirror in my dorm room many times.
On the snap of the ball, I ran through the line and I unleashed a collision on this linebacker. The thump of our pads could probably be heard in the upper deck of the stadium. This guy, six‑foot‑four, 240 pound All-American linebacker, I drove him into the ground. And I looked up and the ball carrier zoomed by me for a score. Touchdown.
The team erupted but I stayed cool, because after what I had been through, it's going to take a little bit more than one play for me to get excited, which added to the disbelief on the coach's face. And when the team settled he was like, “Do it again,” like a dare.
But in this moment, with what was put in front of me, I was unstoppable. And in two plays, I went from sixth on the depth chart to competing with a high school All-American for the starting position, which I eventually won. Booyah! The joy of Cola was alive and I was going to engineering grad school too because I finally won my football scholarship.
I was recently awarded the highest recognition that our government gives to young scientists and engineers for my work in nanotechnology and energy. I got to shake President Obama's hand in the East Room of the White House and I have a great photo to prove it.
But I never expected my life to be where it is today. My two injuries forced me out of football, which introduced me to research, which is a major part of my life today. But looking back, I realized that it was overcoming my injuries and going back to football with success, it ultimately gave me the confidence and determination to go to grad school and do well there.
And after, to become a professor and one hell of an engineer at one of the world's finest research institutions, Georgia Tech.