World's Longest Field Goal- Robot vs NFL Kicker

this is matt prater he's the place kicker for the detroit lions he holds the nfl record for the longest field goal ever which means he's really good at kicking footballs and this is a robot i made which not to brag is also really good at kicking footballs so to settle who's better between the two of us we're going straight to detroit monoi mono man versus machine but to do that i'm gonna need an eight second travel montage [Music] i arrived an hour before him to get the full nfl experience [Music] and so i could soak up the fact that i had an entire stadium just to myself in the most professional way possible [Music] we just got word matt is about 10 minutes out he thinks he's coming here just to teach me all about like the kicking mechanics and the science behind kicking field goals which is partially true i am curious but the real reason i'm here is i built a machine i could kick really far field goals i think it can kick it farther than any human but if i'm really gonna test that hypothesis i need to be kicking against the one human that can kick field goals the farthest and that happens to be matt prater originally a guy named tom dempsey who had a unique kicking foot held the record with a 63-yard field goal and no one could beat that for 43 years but then prater came along and beat his record by one yard with a 64-yard field goal in 2013. is made and he still holds the record nearly a decade later there he is and not only did matt show up but to my absolute delight he brought along his personal trainer who's this this is pax what up pax how are you buddy and so after i joined him for his standard warm-up and stretch routine i went straight for the jugular so do you practice just as much as everyone else on the team i definitely don't practice as much everyone on your team's watches like uh you tongue nobody wants to be the kicker until it's the end of a game and you need a field goal then i asked him how to kick really long field goals and he said it all comes down to just two things leg speed leg speed first and leg speed makes intuitive sense but then he told me the second critical factor is making contact 2.2 inches up from the bottom of the ball extensive research has been done that backs up these two factors as the most critical for maximizing distance so after that he showed me the proper technique to achieve those two factors so you come in an angle so your plant leg should be as close as straight as you can and at this angle so your kicking leg can be straight so right when you're making contact with the ball your kicking leg should be locking right and where do you hit the ball so you'll hit the ball you know the little bone right in the middle of your foot yeah like right here yeah okay right right there this will be the first time in my life i've legitimately attempted to kick a field goal but after matt's coaching he made it seem like it was pretty similar to playing soccer and i like to play soccer you shouldn't have done this but you taught me everything you know so i say we have a competition me versus you i thought of a wager we could have that gatorade thing it's got ice water in it the loser gets dunked all right you're okay with that yeah yeah i feel pretty confident i don't know we'll see we'll see look at this guy sandbagging so with that we were ready to go and this was his first kick which he lined up left footed which didn't bow well for me cause he's not left-footed this is a disaster and then it was my turn all right rover nope lace is out dan gotta remember everything you taught me yep i like that got it nailed it moving back five this is a 25 yarder they might say mark what do you mean 25 you're only on the 15 yard line and that's true but the end zone itself is 10 yards so you always include that with the kick distance got it good shot all right prater let's see what you got pal ignore this don't let this bother you we can have a full conversation what'd you have for breakfast oh goodness that was right in the middle oh that was a bad kick but i'll take it got it got it okay bomb crushed it oh wow so far i don't know our kicks look pretty similar come back guys with room to spare no pressure oh no that almost went over the net man now that we are back to a 45-yard field goal i was just stoked to still be in this is that short what official review i want an official review well there's something i haven't told you i'm actually a barefoot kicker you never saw this coming did you no it's obviously the last thing i expected you in my defense this was a super popular kicking style in the early 80s but with no proven advantage no one really does it anymore except for me get in [Laughter] no oh not cool that's the worst sound you can hear as a kicker too hitting the pole yeah or crossbar oh that was heart wrenching at least the high speed looked kind of cool [Music] and so here's prater for the win oh and just the perfect form all right matt i thought my the barefoot was gonna be my trump card but i'll concede as it stands i'm getting the gatorade bath but while i might not be good at kicking footballs i am good at engineering which technically means i'm really good at kicking footballs let's go baby what is this okay and stop this now you come around back greatest kicker of our generation oh no way you're looking for ray finkel oh my gosh and a clean pair of shorts so now prater knew the real reason i was here but to truly understand what he's up against we have to go back just about one year because that's when with the help of my buddy john here we tested our first prototype john's really good with this kind of rugged high strength build because he's worked in the industry doing props and special effects and so at the end of that first day of testing we could make a 60-yard field goal but honestly it was kind of just barely we needed more power and accuracy because it was really inconsistent but to understand how we fixed it first you need to know how it works fundamentally we've got a hub attached to an axle here it can freely rotate and if you slap a kicking leg on the end they both rotate together then if you put a winch on this side connected to a wire that secures to the hub here and then springs on this side also attached to a wire that attached to the hub in the same spot then when the winch pulls down the springs stretch out as the leg is cocked back into position now we just need a way to fire the thing a quick release is a hook system that easily unhooks when you pull a cord so if we put one of those here and then pull the cord the springs now contract which makes the leg spin real fast for version two of the robot everything had to get much more rugged and compact because we doubled the force from the springs to over a ton and when we went out to test this time it definitely did have more power and our 60 yarders were looking much more promising but because the football was making contact off to the side of the leg it still wasn't as accurate as we wanted for version 3 we changed how the foot attached which allowed us to hit the ball straight on we also tried to determine the best foot diameter as well as the best spot to make contact with the ball but i still wanted even more power which was tricky because there was already so much force that we busted our industrial strength quick release which is why there's a loose bolt in the frame here which is just never something you want to see and so for the fourth and final version we upgraded to a much beefier quick release and then increased our spring force to two tons we also got clever with a mechanical advantage by making the diameter of the leg sprocket twice as small as the driving sprocket so it rotated twice as far but in the same amount of time which means we doubled the speed with a big build like this you are only as strong as your weakest link so this process of prototyping failing and fixing helps flush out all the weak links as quickly as possible until hopefully there's none left and so a year after we first started this fourth version finally had the kind of power and accuracy i was hoping for even if we were definitely pushing the physical limits in a few critical spots for now though it was time to give mr prater a proper introduction so ray finkel is my surrogate this is what i couldn't do even with my bare foot we'll see if we'll ray here can do better now i'm not abandoning everything you taught me here uh-huh okay two steps over okay here we go you ready three two one get up that's my boy that's my boy wow that looked really easy that looked pretty easy i hate to tell you man but that wasn't full power in fact that was only one-third power for a half-power demonstration we went to the extra point location where for reference here is prater the mere human kicking full power into the net and then finkel at half power kicking it into the stands and at this point we'd poke the sleeping giant because first of all matt suspiciously asked me to hold his next kick mommy and secondly after that 50 yarder he continued working his way down the field despite my best efforts to even further rig the competition [Applause] [Music] oh my gosh [Music] you have real bad golf etiquette i have this great idea to arrange with my buddy paul narcola to get some drone racing footage of a field goal because he's the drone racing world champion and that would just be so dope this footage here is from a test session we arranged to see how cool it would look and it turns out the answer is really freaking cool but after we got everything set up a staff member requested we didn't fly drone inside so you're just gonna have to use your imagination as parader bombs the 60 yarder which meant the next kick attempt would be farther than his nfl record and one of the things matt does so well is that technically you want to launch the ball at 45 degrees to maximize the distance on a kick more than that and you waste your energy in height lower than that and it hits the ground prematurely in real life though where the ball experiences drag from wind resistance the ideal angle is closer to 40 degrees which you could see prater has down to a science this is one yard past the nfl record which this man holds i hit off my toe get up i'll take it it'll go back a little further you're crazy dude i'm putting on my rally cap for you buddy as much as i don't want to get doused with gatorade and while matt's taking a few attempts at this 70-yard field goal let me just say that it's really special being in the presence of an elite athlete such as himself don't rule out barefoot here oh my goodness these were honestly the first shots he'd missed all day from anywhere on the field [Music] no dude well done so now that prater was unsuccessful from 70 yards finkel rolled over to potentially win the competition and save me from an ice bath all right here we go a little bit of train horn for good luck and good measure and this is where matt got a little taste of finkel's true range of motion whoa okay this was about 80 full powerful that's all you gotta do dude that's all you gotta do three two one hit it go baby go and so even with the terrible and efficient launch trajectory we'd settled the question of man versus machine that's my boy it's my boy finkel the hang time though so high i think it was going to get there i know but since finkel had made the trip all the way out here we decided to keep going and try his foot next at an 84 yard field goal which is an even 20 yards past the nfl record but first we wanted to try and figure out the foot speed of finkel vs prater so we recorded a few kicks in slo-mo with a checkerboard background behind it this is a trick i learned while at nasa that they've used for ages because if you know the size of each of those squares it allows you to watch back the clip and tell the speed of any moving object in the footage by converting grid boxes per second to miles per hour so when you do this you find matt's foot is moving at an insane 48 miles per hour which puts him right up with the elite place kickers and soccer players the robot's foot however is traveling more than 30 miles an hour faster at a blazing 82 miles per hour we also measured the ball speed after contact and while prater is at 80 miles per hour which is again insanely fast the robot clocks in at 120 miles per hour and that checkered background speed trick is so cool that i invented this i call it the 40 mile an hour blanket because it's a real soft functional blanket on one side but the other side has these squares that are sized just right so that if you film in slow-mo on your phone the math works out perfectly so that you just count how many squares it travels in exactly one slow-mo second and that's how fast it's moving in miles per hour so for example if i film this nerf dart in slow-mo then i play it back and just count the squares it crosses in one second in this case it's 28 squares then we know it was traveling 28 miles per hour and just to prove this approach works we used a radar gun to check our answer and it came up with the exact same speed and so it turns out i throw a nerf football at 15 miles per hour and i can do a short sprint at 12 miles per hour there are 40 total squares which means you could measure anything up to 40 miles per hour with one blanket but if you get two blankets then you can unlock the achievement to measure things up to 80 miles per hour and if you get 16.7 million of them you can measure the speed of light and it's not just a speedometer oh and a cozy blanket you could put on your bed but the back is solid blue which works great as a green screen for filming or for video call background replacement and a very limited quantity are available on my relatively new website markrober.com where every single dollar of anything i sell goes right back into making builds and videos like this one and even if you're like i got plenty of blankets mark i put all the critical square spacing info on the website so you can construct your own grid and still have fun with the science and so now that we knew finkel could blast these balls at 120 miles per hour here was his first attempt from 83 yards although still not quite at full power and i'll explain why in a second okay a little bit of horn now we're ready three two one and when you see this these balls were no deflate gate brady specials these were the most inflated footballs i'd ever handled you could barely dent them in with your hand it's just the pressure from the robot foot was that high the first kick had the worst possible trajectory and so the hang time was hilarious we had quite a bit of energy up in the air i think we need to optimize this a bit but straight is a gosh darn arrow so for the next one we arranged the foot to contact higher up on the ball so it wouldn't pop it up so much but still not a full power kick go please but this one was just short because it knuckleballed and didn't pop up high enough so now we knew exactly where to strike the ball to split the difference between those two and we figured we might as well leave it all on the table and go full throttle which makes now a great time to explain why we weren't just doing this on every kick on our last trip to the practice field we were totally dialed in as you can see here i mean that thing is sub-orbital as a reminder this is a 60-yard attempt this is only four yards shy of the nfl record and as you can see we've got a little room to spare as we pass through the uprights so then just for fun we opened it up and sent all two tons of spring force through the machine and into the ball which is when this happened we're just going absolutely full all of the power one oh my gosh yes if you watch that clip back the ball landed here but it had the height to clear the uprights right here and you'll notice that's right above this unique pattern in the cement and from the satellite view that unique pattern is right here now we were kicking from the 50 yard line so the question is what is that distance well if we borrow this convenient 100-yard measuring stick then that kick would have gone through the uprights with no t and a slight headwind from 105 yards away now this is a bit of a good news bad news situation because on one hand the ability to max out the robot and kick 105 yard field goals is amazing but on the other hand on the very next kick this happened the leg just fell off we might be done for today basically we sheared the key in the key shaft because of the whole two tons of spring force thing and in case you're unfamiliar this is the key it's just a chunk of metal that gets wedged in here so that when the key shaft turns the sprocket turns with it so the final improvement would have been to swap the key shaft with a spline shaft because those distribute the load evenly among many surfaces as opposed to just one unfortunately those spline shafts had a two-week lead time and we were flying to detroit a few days after this right finkel from 83 yards full power plus a little more three two one oh oh watch menkel's head here i'm sorry buddy oh my gosh and sure enough it was the key that was the culprit keys aren't supposed to do this like that's bonkers and so despite the explosive finale i'm calling this a w not only did robot ray finkel beat the nfl record with a 70-yard kick at sea level with no wind but he did it at 80 power and a super inefficient kick trajectory on top of that even though he lost a couple freaking legs in the process he showed he's capable of bombing a 105 yard field goal into a slight headwind right off the turf with no t and so with all that honestly i was willing to let prater off the hook because an argument could be made that i technically sort of cheated but his son pax was already way too excited about the prospect which i thought was just fantastic until it turned out he got off easy by comparison this is me as a four-year-old with an incredibly non-functional 2x4 violin i built now compared to a 120 mile an hour field kicking robot that looks pretty simple but i like that picture because it's a reminder that if you want to get good at literally anything you have to start with the basics when it comes to creating stuff and making the basics seem really fun no one does it better than my good friends at kiwiko who also happen to be supporting this video they're the best because they deliver these really cool monthly crates that contain hands-on projects and diy toys designed to expose kids to the entire range of steam concepts and they all come with really simple kid-friendly instructions plus all the supplies you'll need so you don't need a fully decked out workshop like mine to put it together each one also includes a custom booklet that teaches you practical science and gives you even more experiments you can try out with just stuff lying around your house they have eight different crate lines for all different ages that cover the full steam spectrum from science and engineering to art and design so if you want to support my channel and progress down your path of making cool things with something more impressive than a 2x4 violin go to kiwico.com to get 50 off your first month of any crate this is the first time i've given a promo code that applies to any of their crates so thanks to kiwiko for being the best thanks to ray finkel for kicking till his leg flew off and of course thanks to you for watching you

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 28,509,012

Rating: 4.9285145 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: P_6my53IlxY

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ThuggnSuggs]

The one thing I took from this is that the NFL needs to add drone camera footage of field goal kicks, because that would be awesome!

[u/MC_Knight24]

I'm super impressed this guy was able to make a 40 yard field goal, that's impressive!

[u/kamalaharris1]

wait sex robots can fight back

[u/brutusnair]

Mark was hitting at some amazing distances for an average guy.

[u/NFL_Troll_Identifier]

Looks like Tom Dempsey

[u/ValidMexican]

Mark Rober made a football video?!? That's awesome.

[u/Tuckboi69]

That thumbnail made Tom Brady cream his jeans

[u/Infinite303]

7:54 Forbath/Dan Bailey Kicking a field goal be like