Clinton Portis hit by killer whale, may not play against Ravens

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Clinton Portis just played against Pitt, Dallas, Seattle, and the Giants. With the exception of the Seahawks, Clinton Portis took a severe beating.

Now he has to face the Baltimore Ravens.

Clinton cannot even practice anymore his body is so beat up.

There is talk that the Redskins may hold him out of the Baltimore game.

And now the Killer Whale. What more can a NFL running back handle?

Portis is a perfect example of the violence of applied physics in action on a football field. In a fascinating small book called “The Physics of Football,” Timothy Gay conducts a series of basic equations to help us quantify how Newtonian laws work on the body of a running back. Example: Newton’s Second Law says that force is the product of an object’s mass and acceleration. Let’s say Portis sprints through a hole opened up by his offensive line, at a speed of 30 feet per second. Now Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce enters the picture. Pierce hits him; Portis’s speed immediately after the hit is zero. It takes two-tenths of a second to complete the tackle, from the initial contact of the pads to the moment when Portis’s forward motion is completely stopped.

Dividing Portis’s speed change by the time interval over which it occurred tells us what Portis’s rate of deceleration was — about 150 feet per second squared. Now multiply it by his mass, to find out how much force acted on him. Gay’s equation works out to negative 1,150 pounds of force. In other words, about three-fifths of a ton slammed him in the backward direction. As Gay points out, “That’s the weight of a small adult killer whale.”

Says Portis, “That makes sense to me.”

source

Ok, so it was a small adult killer whale.

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