Amish

During a football game, punter Ray Guy kicked the football 72 yards. A comment was made by a sportscaster that they believed the football was filled with helium. "Sports and Science meet frequently. Radar guns, after all, are used to time baseball pitches. But when officials halted the Auburn-MSU game an seized the football after a 71-yard punt, things grew a bit odd." (Lafferty) The football was taken and tested and it disproved the sportscaster's statement because there was no helium in the football, just air. This however, got some people to pondering and they conducted some tests to find out if a football filled with helium would travel farther than one filled with air.

There were two experiments completed. One experiment was completed by WBNS television. The second experiment was done by a team of physicists and chemists from The Ohio State University in collaboration with the Columbus Dispatch..

The experiment completed by WBNS concluded that the helium-filled ball traveled 10 yards farther when the wind was the back of the kicker, but traveled 5 yards less when the wind blew toward the kicker as compared with the air-filled football.

The first experiment done by WBNS had many flaws such as: the sample size was too small; the kicker was aware which ball was air filled and which was helium filled which could have had a mental impact on the way the kicker kicked the ball; and there was no record of the randomization of when each ball was used.

The conclusions of the first experiment would lead us to believe that a football filled with helium does indeed travel farther then a football with air. However, since the experiment did have so many flaws and was not conducted in a controlled environment, we cannot make an accurate conclusion.

The second experiment was a bit more organized. In the second experiment with the team of physicists and chemists, two identical footballs, one air-filled and one helium-filled, were used outdoors on a windless day at The Ohio State University's athletic complex. Each football was kicked 39 times and the footballs alternated with each kick. An experimenter recorded the distance traveled by each ball.

Appendix A contains data sets that were observed during the experiment. The descriptive statistics in Appendix A for air and helium-filled football lists some of the basic statistics calculated from the 39 observations. An analysis of the basic statistics found between the two samples can be performed. We can see there are differences in the two data sets. The mean distance of the helium-filled football is 26.4 yards. This is greater than the 26 distance traveled by the football filled with air. This may lead us to suggest that the helium-filled football on average travels farther than a football filled with air.

However, there are some underlying variables that are not accounted for in the experiments. If we were to graph each kick on a line graph as in figure 1, we can see "the line chart of the total distance of the air-filled and helium-filled footballs for each trial has an upward trend at the beginning and then levels off. The kicker improved with practice." (Texas A&M Statistics Web Site)

Figure 1.

Appendix A contains data sets that were observed during the experiment. The data set was obtained from the website of Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences of Duke University. (www.stat.duke.edu) From the data sets we can graphically view some of the other data found in Appendix A through the box plots using the 5 number summary.. See figure 2 which shows the 5 number summary for both data sets.

Figure 2.

Air-Filled Football Helium-Filled Football

Low 15 Low 11

Q1 23.5 Q1 24.5

Mid 26 Mid 28

Q3 28.5 Q3 30

High 35 High 39

If we graph the data from the five number summary above into box plots we get something that looks like figure 3..

Figure 3.

The box plots do not give us much information except that the spread is larger with regards to the football filled with helium than that of the football filled with air. The mid spread is close to being the same with the helium-filled football plot is just a bit higher on the scale. The mean of each data set is only separated by two yards.. Since the box plots do not give us a lot of information as far as the skew goes, we need to study the same data on a histogram.

This data in appendix