Why NFL Quarterbacks Can't Pitch A Baseball

Ajouté : 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]So Malik Willis just went viral for this.

[00:00:13]Of course, the reactions were all reasonable. This is clearly a sign that he's a bad QB. No other quarterback in the history of the league has ever Wait, is that Patrick Mahomes?

[00:00:29]When it comes to throwing a football, I've always assumed that there's a lot of carryover with throwing a baseball.

[00:00:34]But when a quarterback is asked to throw out the first pitch, bro, a lot of the times is pretty embarrassing. Why are there so many NFL quarterbacks who can't throw a simple baseball pitch? Saying they can't pitch is a little tongue and cheek, but I wanted to learn a little more about it, and I'm bringing y'all with me. Now, just straight up blind, my best comparison comes from my real life.

[00:00:55]In high school, I was a hooper. Now, I want y'all to imagine this. A lot of y'all have been through the same thing yourself. But you're in a gym. The court is free. You got enough people to play, but you don't have a ball. At some point, somebody finally walks in with a ball, but it ain't regulation. It's a girl ball. The difference between a girl ball and a standard ball is literally only 2 oz. The difference in circumference is only an inch. But when using it, my muscle memory was shot. Not only was my performance worse playing with the girl ball, when I switched back to a standard ball, my shot would be off. My whole system had to be re-calibrated. So, when I imagine going from a football to a baseball, bro, there's way more elements at play. Not only is the weight discrepancy much larger, but the shape is also totally different. But I play third base and wide receiver. So, when it comes to understanding the complex mechanics of these throwing disciplines, I'm a complete novice.

[00:01:55]So, I figured instead of just relying on my subjective high school experience, seeing as how I have the internet, it would make sense to use it to do a little research and lean on somebody with more expertise.

[00:02:09]Tom House was a major league pitching veteran who went on to become a major league pitching coach. Dude helped out legends like Nolan Ryan who credited House in his Hall of Fame speech. Tom House is known as the father of modern biomechanics and he's the perfect guy cuz he's a baseball legend, but he's also worked with Tom Brady and Drew Brees. At one point, he was being used by 30 out of 32 starting NFL quarterbacks. My point is he's an expert in both of these worlds. And after he retired from baseball, he built a team to help him understand it even more.

[00:02:44]They started out in the8s just using their eyes and video recording, but quickly realized there's things the human eye can't see. About 20 years ago, House and his team made a breakthrough.

[00:02:54]They created graphs to measure kinematic sequences. That's just the order and speed that each body part accelerates and decelerates. So, his legs, hips, shoulders, then finally arm.

[00:03:08]They were able to create these graphs to measure kinematic sequences. And they realized the throwing motion between baseball and football were even more similar than they had thought. When they over overlapped them, they only saw two differences. Those differences were timing and weight shift. You can see Brady and Burrow trying to compensate, but without enough reps to recalibrate properly, they both missed to the opposite sides of their body.

[00:03:35]So, why are two of the most accurate QBs of their eras struggling to get the ball to a stationary target? This is Joe Burrow just a couple years earlier throwing out the first pitch in a Red's game. Now, this time he's throwing it to his head coach, so he's clearly not trying to juice it here. But in the more recent clip, and this is just my read on it, I think he's using more of the rotational techniques that he's learned in football to increase his velocity to get more power on the deep passes. But I think it's a lot harder to calibrate the timing of it. If you stuck around for the whole clip, you can see it calibrate pretty dang fast in real time. Mahomes and Malik Willis in these clips maybe didn't compensate quite enough.

[00:04:15]Therefore, the ball flies up and to the same side that they released it on. This is Mahomes just a couple years later after probably spending just a little bit of time actually recalibrating to throwing a baseball.

[00:04:29]So like house said bro it's timing and weight shift. The complexity is really introduced when you start to consider the reasons why the timing and weight shift are so different. The same arm action is utilized in quarterback mechanics and pitching mechanics. But because the football weighs three times more, a quarterback's arm path will be much shorter. So pitchers get their shoulders much more involved while quarterbacks tend to be elbow dominant.

[00:04:56]I don't use words like arm path every day, but I can picture the logic and it makes perfect sense. If I'm throwing a tennis ball, bro, I'm all out here. But if I'm throwing a medicine ball, I'm like from here to here. Shorter arm path. But another major factor that affects the timing and the weight transfer. It's the nature of the sports.

[00:05:14]Pitchers have one full second to transfer their weight and get into foot strike. But quarterbacks need to complete this same process all in under 2 seconds. And while a pitcher stride length is ideally the length of six to seven of his own feet, for a quarterback, that distance is one of his feet, so six or seven times shorter.

[00:05:36]Now, I don't know all the science behind these mechanics, but the reason it came about is really obvious. Quarterbacks play in a crowded pocket and have 300 lb monsters trying to break them in half.

[00:05:47]So, there's no time for a long wind up or an exaggerated follow-through. Bro, imagine what you would do if you ever saw your quarterback in a pocket standing like this.

[00:05:58]But for a pitcher, they need all the velocity or all the kinetic energy they can get to get action on the ball. Most elite quarterbacks once they get into the league really start to fine-tune these throwing mechanics. They don't want what would be wasted movement in football. They fine-tune their training to do what they need to do.

[00:06:15]>> Who's a quarterback in the league now that you're like, he's mechanically like the cyine chapel? He's a textbook thrower.

[00:06:22]>> Yeah. Way be Joe Burrow is the first one. So I've been working with Joe since his junior year college. And what we've done is just taken momentum out of his game. So even if even LSU Joe that went nuts and you know had the best year we've ever seen, he did not use the ground to move and his arms gotten I would say 25% more velocity. And so we just start with the body and how you move and how we start literally from the ground up. How do you use the ground?

[00:06:44]And so what's happened with Joe is we're really looking at inefficient movements.

[00:06:47]And how we move is I put force in the ground to create leverage to push my hips in the direction I want to go.

[00:06:52]>> And I felt like I couldn't get my front foot down the way I really wanted to.

[00:06:56]>> Yeah.

[00:06:56]>> And so I shifted it 50/50 >> so I can get that front foot down faster and get my back hip through faster. And it just makes >> everything faster, more compact, and more powerful.

[00:07:08]>> Right. after my knee injury. Putting a little more weight on that front foot makes it a little more stable and I'm not just kind of sticking it out there.

[00:07:16]Okay. Waiting to get hit.

[00:07:17]>> Right.

[00:07:18]>> So, for a lot of them, and again, this is not all of them, but for a lot of them, first time you toss them a baseball and say, "Hey, go out there in front of thousands of people, you might not get the results you'd expect."

[00:07:29]Another variable that came up when I was researching often goes overlooked, and that's the pitcher mount. So apparently it sits 10 inches off the ground, almost a full foot, which is higher than a lot of people probably realize, especially us non baseball fans.

[00:07:46]It's there to allow pitchers to get more velocity. And when you're calibrated forward, it's a massive help. But when you're not calibrated forward, you might get results like this. When a NFL quarterback releases the ball, he's usually doing so on an upward trajectory cuz he's got to get the ball over the defensive line. But a pitcher is sitting up higher than the target. So they're releasing the ball on a more downward trajectory. So even the throwing postures are drastically different with quarterbacks standing much more upright.

[00:08:18]If you've never fine-tuned or specialized in anything, first off, I'd advise you to do it cuz the process is super rewarding. But if you haven't done it, you might not realize how massive these subtle differences can be. And you can see this across other areas of life.

[00:08:33]So I found a clip of a NASCAR driver and an F1 driver pulling up to the track one day and switching cars. They drive the other car with like 20 minutes of practice. So this is actually perfect for the point I'm trying to make. So let's check out just a little bit of that.

[00:08:48]>> Hi, welcome to Bahrain International Circuit where we're doing the car swap between Fernando Alonso and Jimmy Johnson. You can see the two cars behind me. Got Jimmy Johnson's NASCAR that's come all the way from the States and then we've got here a McLaren Formula 1 car behind me. It's going to be really interesting to see how the two drivers get on in the different cars. You know, just looking at them, you can see the big differences between them. We've got the NASCAR, big heavy car, big tires, big heavy low revving V8 engine in the front. Whereas we've got the Formula 1 car, much lighter, high revving engine, low torque, a lot of power, but it all comes very late and obviously a lot of downforce. So, it'll be really interesting to be see how Jimmy gets on.

[00:09:23]I'm going to be running him. So, my first run out, um, my NASCAR helmet, you know, be behind a windshield in that vehicle. So, coming down the front straightaway, as soon as I grabbed fifth gear, uh, the helmet lifted up so far, I was looking at my microphone. So, my talk microphone here was was all the way up my ey line. There's so much air coming over the top of that car that it was literally trying to pull my helmet off.

[00:09:42]>> So, here we are at the Bar International Circuit, swapping cars with Jimmy Johnson and me driving the the Nazca for the first time. You know, these cars, they they feel very different compared the the single seats, the Formula 1, but a lot of fun, you know, out there in the in the racetrack and very powerful cars.

[00:09:59]Uh u sliding around, very uh little grips, >> just such a different experience. And I don't think I'll stop smiling for months.

[00:10:08]>> When you're highly specialized in a particular area, it's not that your skills won't transfer over, but it generally takes an adjustment period. is like a career screenwriter doing their first novel, or a career novelist trying to write their first screenplay, a classical pianist trying to play in a southern church, a tennis player's first day on the pickle ball court. At the end of the day, these dudes have the tools.

[00:10:30]They got the kinematic sequences all the way down. There's an adjustment period, and it just takes reps. But as long as Malik Willis can do this, it really don't matter if he can do this.