April 29--In American colleges and universities, the discord and suspicion between athletes, the "jocks," and academics, the "nerds," is longstanding and deep. The irrepressible Groucho Marx captured these conflicting attitudes in the 1932 college satire "Horsefeathers" when, as president of fictional Huxley College, he told his professors, "Where would this college be without football? Have we got a stadium? Have we got a college? Well we can't support both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college."
That was 20th century thinking. Today jocks and nerds not only coexist, they collaborate to enhance athletic performance, improve teams and make contact sports safer. Classroom lessons increasingly suffuse sports. Everyone benefits.
The best example of this new collaboration may be in the Ivy League, where coaches of the football teams have voted to eliminate full-contact practices in the regular season. What's more, two engineer-athletes from Dartmouth, with input from the dean of engineering and the football coach, have constructed a mobile, self-righting tackling dummy.
This MVP (mobile virtual player), made of foam-vinyl and metal, can move across the football field at speeds comparable to a college athlete's and is now used as the tackling dummy at Dartmouth practices. In simulated game situations, players learn correct tackling technique by tackling the mobile dummy instead of each other. Essentially a design project from the engineering school has been a key to reducing the hits in practice that can cause concussions -- and the type of practice contact that could lead to concussions in games as well.
Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens, who banned tackling in practice in 2010 and helped come up with the idea for MVP, told The Washington Post, "If you take one (hit) on a Tuesday (at practice), and you take a decent hit on Saturday (game day), the fact you had a subconcussive hit on Tuesday may contribute to the concussive hit on Saturday. And if you don't have that subconcussive hit on Tuesday, and you had that same hit on Saturday, you're probably not concussed."
With no-tackle practices, Teevens' Dartmouth teams haven't suffered on Saturdays; they have lost only three of 20 games in the last two years. Who said football coaches are the dummies?
Throughout sports there are other examples of scientific innovations that are reducing injury and making players better. High definition video analysis and the science of physics have become essential tools in baseball. Hi-def video is used to study pitchers' motions and the stresses they place on their arms. With good cause: Pitching is basically the transmission of body energy to the ball to make it travel 60 feet 6 inches by generating momentum through large and small muscle movement. Excessive or unbalanced forces placed on muscles, ligaments and tendons are what cause damage and injury. Meanwhile, hitters make minute studies of slow-mo video to generally improve their swings and specifically generate greater bat speed at the nanosecond of impact.
And since the author Michael Lewis published the book "Moneyball" in 2003 about the Oakland Athletics, there has been a statistical revolution, not just in baseball but in all sports. Through the use of the computer, sophisticated stats now profile the arc of the jump shot, the speed of the slap shot and the acrobatics of golf balls driven off the tee. The twin goals: performance and, in some sports, safety.
Where professional teams once hired retread players as executives, many now look to universities for graduates with advanced degrees who know how to apply these statistics to build teams. Cases in point: Theo Epstein, the Cubs' president of baseball operations, earned a law degree at the University of San Diego on the back of his undergraduate degree from Yale. Rick Hahn, White Sox vice president and general manager, is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Harvard Law and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business. Neither Epstein nor Hahn ever played a day of professional baseball.
This paradigm shift has provoked the inevitable pushback from the sports Luddites -- the coaches, players and fans who resist new technology, regardless of whether it results in improved performance or fewer injuries. But the march of progress is overriding those protests.
Today, virtually all successful coaches and players understand that brains are as important as brawn -- and in even greater need of protection. The Dartmouth MVP, the high-def video film room and the stats-happy computer are bridging the age-old divide between jocks and nerds. Groucho won't have to tear down the college after all.
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