- This is Matt Prater.
He's the placekicker 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, mano y mano,
man versus machine.
But to do that,
I'ma need an eight-second travel montage.
(upbeat pop music)
I arrived an hour before him to get the full NFL experience
(upbeat pop music continues)
and so I could soak up the fact
that I had an entire stadium just to myself
in the most professional way possible.
(upbeat pop music continues)
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
that can kick really far field goals.
I think it can kick it farther than any human.
But if I'm really good 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 can beat that for 43 years.
But then Prater came along and beat his record by 1 yard
with a 64-yard field goal in 2013.
- [Commentator] Good! (crowd cheers)
History 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 warmup 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
as everybody else. (Mark laughs)
- Everyone on your team is watching is like, "Oh, you punk."
- Everybody wants to be the kicker
until it's the end of a game and you need a field goal.
- [Mark] Then I asked him how to kick
really long field goals,
and he said it all comes down to just two things.
- Leg speed, I'd say is first. - Leg speed?
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 and 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 at contact. - I see.
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 there?
- Yeah, like right here?
- Yeah, about right there. - Okay.
- 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. I'm down. - You okay with that?
- Yep. Yeah, that works. - You seem pretty confident.
- I don't know.
We'll see. We'll see. (Mark laughs)
- 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 go well for me,
Oh! (laughing) - Yeah.
- 'cause he's not left footed.
This is a disaster.
And then it was my turn.
All right, Rober. Nope.
Laces Out, Dan!
Gotta remember everything you taught me.
- Yep.
- I like that.
(Mark exhales)
- Got it.
- Nailed it! - Nice.
- Moving back 5.
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. - All right.
- Ignore this. Don't let this bother you.
- We can have a full conversation.
- What'd you have for breakfast?!
Ohh, goodness. That was right in the middle.
- Ooh, that was a bad kick, but I'll take it.
- [Matt] Got it.
- Got it!
Okay.
- [Matt] Bomb.
Crushed it.
- Ohh, wow.
So far, I don't know, our kicks look pretty similar.
- [Matt] Come back.
Crushed it. Got it. - Good?! Was that good?!
(Mark laughs) - Easy, 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.
- Aargh! Was that short?! - Is that in?
- 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?
- [Matt] No. (Mark laughs)
It's honestly the last thing I expected you to do.
- [Mark] 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.
- [Matt] Good hit.
(Mark exclaims) (Matt laughs)
- No!
(ball thuds)
Oh, not cool.
- That's the worst sound you can hear is a kicker too,
hitting the pole, yeah, the crossbar.
- Oh, that was heart-wrenching.
At least the high-speed looked kind of cool.
(ambient music)
And so, here's Prater for the win!
Oh. (laughing)
And just the perfect form.
(ambient music continues)
All right, Matt,
I thought 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.
(Mark whistles)
(train horn blares)
Let's go, baby! (laughing)
- [Matt] (laughing) What is this?
- Okay, and stop.
This, now you come around back,
greatest kicker of our generation.
- [Matt] Oh, no way.
- You're looking for Ray Finkle.
(train horn blares)
- Oh my God. (Mark laughs)
- And a clean pair of shorts.
- [Mark] 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
'cause he is 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,
connect it to a wire that secures to the hub here,
and then springs on this side also attach to a wire
that attach 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 of the side of the leg,
it still wasn't as accurate as we wanted.
(Mark exclaims)
So, for version three, 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 wanna 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 some 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 flesh 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.
(bell dings)
For now though, it was time to give Mr. Prater
a proper introduction.
So, Ray Finkle is my surrogate.
This is what I couldn't do even with my barefoot.
We'll see if ol' 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?
3, 2, 1.
(machine whirs)
Get up!
That's my boy! That's my boy! (laughing)
- Wow, that looked really easy.
- That looked pretty easy? - Yeah, that went really easy.
- I hate to tell you, Matt, 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 Finkle at half power
(machine whirs)
kicking it into the stands.
(Mark laughs)
And at this point, we'd poke the sleeping giant
because first of all,
Matt suspiciously asked me to hold his next kick.
Mommy.
Oh! (laughing)
And secondly,
after that 50-yarder, - Got it.
- [Mark] he continued working his way down the field,
despite my best efforts to even further rig the competition.
(train horn blares)
(Mark laughs)
- Oh my God.
- And it's good!
- You have real bad golf etiquette.
- [Mark] I had this great idea,
to arrange with my buddy Paul Nurkalla
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 Prater bombs this 60-yarder.
Oh, it's good!
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.
- Ugh, I hit off my toe.
Get up.
- [Mark] It's good! - Oh, is it in?
I'll take it. (Mark laughs)
We'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 wanna 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.
You know what I mean? - (laughing) All right.
- Oh my goodness.
- No, that's way short.
- Ugh.
These were honestly the first shots he'd missed all day
from anywhere on the field.
(Matt groans)
(Matt and Mark exclaim)
- No.
- Dude, well done.
So, now that Prater was unsuccessful from 70 yards,
Finkle 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.
(train horn blares)
And this is where Matt got a little taste
of Finkle's true range of motion.
- Whoa, okay. (laughing) (Mark laughs)
- This was about 80% full power form.
That's all you gotta do, dude.
That's all you gotta do. - Okay.
3, 2, 1.
Hit it!
Go baby, go!
And so, even with the terrible,
inefficient launch trajectory, - Got it.
- [Mark] we'd settled the question of man versus machine.
That's my boy! That's my boy!
Finkle!
The hang time though, right? - Dude, it was so high.
I think it was gonna get there.
It when, like, straight up. - I know!
But since Finkle 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 Finkle versus Prater.
So, we recorded a few kicks in slow-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 two 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 backer on 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 discount 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 at the exact same speed.
And so, it turns out, I throw a nerve 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 can 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 can measure the speed of light.
And it's not just a speedometer,
(glass shatters) oop, (laughing)
and a cozy blanket you can 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,
"Pff, I got plenty of blankets, Mark."
I put all the critical square spacing info on the website
so you could construct your own grid
and still have fun with the science.
And so, now that we knew Finkle 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.
(train horn blares)
Now we're ready.
3, 2, 1.
And when you see this,
these balls were no Deflategate 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.
(machine clatters)
Go! (laughing)
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 as 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!
(Mark exclaims)
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 suborbital.
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!
(laughing) Oh my gosh.
Yes!
As 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've gone through the uprights,
with no tee, 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.
(machine clatters)
The leg just fell off.
We might be done for today. (laughing)
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've been
to swap the key shaft with a spline shaft
because those distribute the load evenly among many services
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, Finkle from 83 yards, full power plus a little more.
3, 2, 1.
Oh!
Watch Finkle's head here.
I'm sorry, buddy.
(laughing) 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 Finkle 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 of fricking legs
in the process,
he showed he is capable of bombing 105-yard field goal
into a slight headwind right off the turf with no tee.
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.