Amazon and Russell Wilson are pulling the dumbest, most nonsensical NFL prank

Nobody really cares about Thursday Night Football, but Amazon sure does. After spending $1.3B to air games this season, they’re trying to amp up the excitement — and that includes making ludicrous claims like this one.

Amazon is claiming that it has teamed up with Wilson to create a new football exclusively for Thursday Night Football, which is thinner, longer, and purportedly more aerodynamic. It should be noted that this is absolutely impossible. There is no planet in which the NFL would subvert the basic rules of football size and weight to appease a broadcaster, let alone allow a different football to be used on Thursday compared with Sunday or Monday.

Continuing this prank, Russell Wilson jumped on board to show off the new ball with the most preposterous example possible.

A safe estimate for an NFL tackle dummy is roughly 100 pounds, though they vary greatly. So let’s assume that this is an even 100 for sake of argument. Russ throws the new ball and blasts it off its spot, causing it to travel almost 15 yards downfield.

In order for this to be accurate the new football would need to generate approximately 500N of force at the point of contact, and that’s not taking into account the friction coefficient with the ground, or the distance it travels — frankly because I suck at math. That said, to knock the dummy over at all it would require Russell Wilson to throw a 15 ounce football at approximately 64 mph. It would take much, much more than that to throw the dummy back like it had been hit with a cannon.

Throw velocity isn’t something that’s typically measured in the NFL, but Drew Brees was clocked at 52 mph in an episode of Sports Science, and Patrick Mahomes allegedly hit 60 mph at the 2017 combine, the fastest ever recorded.

So yeah, this is absolute B.S. I don’t understand why anyone would imagine this was fun or exciting. It’s just dumb.