The degree of that Frisbee spin depends on the motion of the thumb. Coins flipped from a thumb don’t merely rotate around their axis, but they also spin like a Frisbee. Using a camera from the Stanford engineering department that snapped 1,000 frames per second, they determined that the laws of basic mechanics play a large role. Holmes co-authored the study with Persi Diaconis, her husband who is a magician-turned-Stanford-mathematician, and Richard Montgomery, a UC-Santa Cruz mathematics professor, in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the physics involved. “The way we flip coins creates a bias, and that makes it stay more time in the position it starts in,” said Holmes, the Stanford professor. (Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi was said to be a “heads” man because he mistakenly believed more metal on that side of the coin increased the odds of it landing up.) It’s not the size or the weight of the coin, either. Nor is it any other variable such as wind speed, air temperature or phase of the moon. The determining factor is not how high a coin is flipped, according to the study. Researchers would say Nedney was not asking the right question. “How could you possibly know how many rotations the coin makes?” “There’s so much variance in how a coin is flipped,” Nedney said. That, countered kicker Joe Nedney, is just plain ridiculous. “And if it works for us, I’ll be the first one to support that study,” he said. They quickly saw how - if the study were accurate - they might be able to gain an advantage.Ĭenter Eric Heitmann, a Stanford graduate and 49ers captain, said: “I’ve never heard anything like that before, but I guarantee that I will be thinking about it each time I’m out there for the coin toss.”Ī sly smile even emerged on the face of linebacker Takeo Spikes, another 49ers captain. Officials were surprised that anyone had bothered to conduct a study examining coin-tossing odds.Īt the 49ers training facility in Santa Clara, players had two initial reactions:ġ) Don’t those eggheads have more important things to do?īut the more the 49er players listened, the more they became intrigued. The Stanford and University of California-Santa Cruz researchers would suggest that Collins missed a golden opportunity to shade the odds in his favor.Īlthough the study’s results would seem to potentially tilt the NFL’s playing field, the league office in New York doesn’t believe it has a problem. It would have been clearly visible to Collins if he had looked. But before the coin flip, referee Bill Leavy, a former San Jose policeman and firefighter, had held the silver dollar out on his thumb. Pittsburgh elected to receive the kickoff and marched down the field for the game-winning field goal. 10, when Tennessee quarterback Kerry Collins called the overtime coin toss and lost. And heading into this season, the team winning the overtime toss had won 63.3 percent of the games - and won the game 43.3 percent of the time on its first possession, preventing the other team from even touching the ball.Ĭonsider the very first game of the season, on Sept. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for his role in the 2007 film version of Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” in which the villain tosses a coin to decide whether he should kill someone or let them live.īut nowhere in modern society does the coin flip loom larger than in sports - specifically the NFL.Ī coin toss determines which team gets the football first in overtime if the score is tied after regulation play. The coin flip even is found in literature and cinema. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all four. 3, 1959, that allowed early rock ‘n’ roll star Ritchie Valens to get a seat on a small plane that was supposed to carry him, Buddy Holly and two others to their next concert site. The Oregon city of Portland got its name after a best two-out-of-three penny toss by two settlers. But coin flips also have played much more prominent roles. Tossing a coin long has been a choice for deciding trivial matters - like a dinner-table spat over the last piece of pizza. “You have to know how it starts.”Īnd if you know that, the researchers believe, then you have a better chance of knowing how it will land. “But they’ve all been wrong because people write down whether it comes up heads or tails, but they don’t know how it started,” said Susan Holmes, a Stanford University statistics professor who co-authored the study, which was published in 2007.
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