The physics of flopping: SMU researcher studies mechanics of NBA fakeryA Story by Leimar SmithThe physics of flopping: SMU researcher studies mechanics of NBA fakeryThe Koyal Group InfoMag
Dallasnews.com Was it a flop or not?
Last summer, Dallas Mavericks
owner Mark Cuban gave Southern Methodist University more than $100,000 to try
to answer that question scientifically.
On Thursday, SMU biomechanics expert Peter Weyand demonstrated the early stages
of his flopping research to a small group of journalists. Flopping is when an athlete fakes
a fall to trick referees into calling a foul on an opponent. The behavior is
prevalent in sports such as basketball and soccer.
It’s an especially sore point
with fans.
“In regular life, people tend to
dislike dishonest people, and the same thing goes for basketball,” said Jeff
Lenchiner, editor of the NBA news site InsideHoops.com. “It’s dishonesty
expressed physically, and it’s considered an insult to the game.”
In one compilation of flops posted
to YouTube involving Manu Ginobili of the San Antonio Spurs, an outraged
spectator calls the behavior “a disease” and a mark of cowardice, “bad
sportsmanship and horrible acting.”
Flopping also costs players
money. Last year, the National Basketball Association cracked down on the
practice. Players now receive a warning after their first flop, followed by a
series of escalating fines, from $5,000 for two flops to $30,000 for five
violations.
Weyand says there is plenty of good science that can come from
studying flopping. “This is uncharted territory,” he says. Scientists lack even
a basic understanding of how much force is required to topple someone.
That is one of the experiments
Weyand demonstrated Thursday. D’Marquis Allen, an SMU sophomore, stood on a
treadmill-like platform. Wearing black spandex shorts, a black cycling T-shirt
and reflective sensors stuck to his skin, he braced himself for a shove. Soon a
lab volunteer pushed him in the chest with a device called a “flop-buster”: a
padded yellow bar embedded with sensors. Allen took several steps back.
“That was definitely a foul,”
Weyand said later, after measuring the force of the collision.
The research team was surrounded
by gadgets that will help it measure the mechanics of basketball collisions.
High-speed cameras recorded motion in three-dimensional space. Force plates
beneath the platform on which Allen was standing marked his center of gravity.
And motion sensors measured Allen’s position, velocity and acceleration.
The goal: to help officials tell
flop from foul by simply looking at a video.
“I feel strongly about
introducing science and data to situations in business and sports where there
previously had been none,” Cuban said by email. “I love to challenge
conventional wisdom with” research.
But at this stage, it’s unclear
whether flopping can be measured scientifically.
“I have doubts that a monitoring
system could distinguish flops from legitimate falls with an accuracy
approaching [or exceeding] the opinion of a human observer,” Steve Robinovitch,
a biomechanics expert at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada,
wrote in an email.
There may be too many variables,
he said, from whether a player is expecting the collision, to his precise
posture at the time, to the location where the force is applied.
That’s why Weyand is starting
small. For now, he is studying collisions between a moving offensive player and
a stationary defensive player. In the second phase, set to take place this
summer, he plans to move the experiment into a basketball-like setting to test
the forces involved when two moving players collide.
The project is set to end in
August, when Weyand’s team must report findings to Cuban’s company Radical
Hoops, which funded the research. He then plans to submit his findings to a
peer-reviewed journal.
“The real value in these studies
is looking toward injury prevention analytics " to predict injury risk
factors,” said Gregory Myer, a sports medicine expert at Cincinnati Children’s
Hospital Medical Center. “And that’s where the focus really has the big
payoff.” © 2013 Leimar Smith |
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Added on December 18, 2013 Last Updated on December 18, 2013 Tags: The physics of flopping, SMU researcher studies mechanics, The Koyal Group InfoMag |