Good archers can hit 25 out of 30 regularly, with all 30 being 10′s an 9′s … again with a gold spot 1/3 the size they are showing.

Olympic archers shoot exclusively at 70 meters, and the full size target you see in the video (120 cm) with a type of bow (recurve) that is inherently more difficult to shoot with the same accuracy as a compound bow.

Hell some people here might have been quarterbacks.

The Cleveland Browns once had a quarterback, Frank Ryan, with a Ph.D. in math. He was a pretty good player, although not outstanding by NFL standards.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1077719/index.htm

fyi.. I define a “good archer” as anyone who has released as many arrows as Drew Brees threw footballs. Includes practice and competition.

Your calibration would be reasonable if you wanted to set up a fun competition between people from different sports, but since there was no competing archer in the video it makes no sense here. All you can deduce is that Bree is more accurate than other quarterbacks.

Hugely impressive skills though, no doubt about that!

@Archer: How the heck is your definition of a fair comparison the same distance?

What if you wanted to know who was more accurate: a winning archer or a spitting contest winner? Would you have the spitter spit 70 meters? Or the archer shoot at 5 meters?

To make up for the obvious advantage in accuracy having a bow and arrow compared to either the spitter or the quarterback, you need to calibrate them. The show attempted to do that by noting that archers at 70m hit the the target 50% of the time, and a reasonable quarterback hit the moving target dummies 50% of the time at 20 yards.

Whether that calibration is spot on or not, it is certainly at least *trying* to equalize the abilities, rather than the insane idea of a fair comparison being the same distance for both.

At 20 yards a top archer would expect 100% in the 10 ring (‘bullseye’) even on a target half that size.

<– loves football. Mostly a college guy though.

PS: I stole the linebacker’s girl in HS.

I had to blink a couple of times. Did you not get the memo? The whole point of this is prelude to the Superbowl, because unlike in bad 80′s movies, sometimes people who can read above a sixth grade level can also enjoy sports. Hell some people here might have been quarterbacks.

But if you’re going to talk about the science of sports, or science in general, it has to be right. That’s kind of the point of science. With a sport as esoter- um, rarely enjoyed, as archery I really doubt most of the people here actually prefer it over football. The issue is whether or not it is a meaningful comparison. It’s like asking whether a kicker scores more than a quarterback considering time spent on the field. It all depends on whether you think it’s fair to compare them that way and whether making that kind of comparison means anything significant anyway.

@Spiv

Oh I know from experience they result in tumbling. I just wish there was some way to make that not happen- since reliable suction cup weapons could be a lot of fun. Maybe a contraption that opens up at the last second, but I’m a fan of less constrained design. (I own a recalled Toyota ) Maybe the rubber material can be flat against the shaft (tee-hee) and then if elastic enough, spring forward with the force of the arrow’s impulse upon deceleration. (Oh how I wish I lived in the country, apartments in the city are not conducive to experiments with projectiles.)

Is your crying over science or the fact that you got to watch qb’s beat you up and get the girls they lusted for in high school?

The best part is quarterbacks dont even train at this exercise after like 8th grade. They instead only work with real receivers and defenders under pressure. So this whole test is an anathema to Brees and he still aces it.

Suck it geeks

If nothing else there are suction cup darts littered around my house. Could just prop one of those up.

It would also be interesting to see some boundary layer interactions on regular arrows.

Also, arrows wobble too! There’s considerable elastic deformation on release since the nocked arrow is compressed against the string and this is usually manifested as a slight bend along the central axis. Why didn’t they mention that?

Now what I wanna see is the aerodynamics of those suction cup arrows that never worked for me as a kid.

If you’re off by 2.4″ at 60 feet (the edge of the bullseye), you’ll be off by a full foot at 90 meters. This is about halfway out on the target. Consistently scoring at that level makes you a reasonable amateur, but it’s still not analogous until you have the guy throw endzone to endzone and suffer the issues of being outdoors, with variable air temperature, human eyesight issues, etc etc.

Claire

Claire I’ll get my coat..

Half-remembered classical mechanics (and my copy of Fetter and Walecka is at the office, nuts!) but for a symmetrical top, the fact that two of the moments of inertia mean that there is no change in the rotation rate around the third axis, so no tumbling end over end. The coupled equations led to something like the projection of the angular momentum vector on the symmetry axis being constant, so it precesses around in the classic football spiral.

Or maybe not. Anyone?