Stewartville science teacher explains connection between football and physics on NFL Network show – Post Bulletin

STEWARTVILLE — What do science and football have in common? As it turns out, a lot.

Stewartville Middle School science teacher and high school football coach Brandon Hoth had a unique opportunity to share how he uses the sport to teach his students physics, and he did so on national television on

Good Morning Football on NFL Network

.

It all started when Hoth, Stewartville’s ninth-grade football coach, posted on Twitter and shared how he uses GMFB’s Angry Runs segment to teach Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Hoth tagged Kyle Brandt, the host of the segment in which Brandt breaks down “an NFL player’s most aggressive, powerful or defiant run from the previous week.” This player then gets an award sent to them, and they can take a photo with it before it’s passed along to the next winner.

Hoth said he has been showing clips from the show in his physical science classes for a few years. Brandt saw the post, and producers reached out to Hoth to bring him on the show on Wednesday morning.

“Growing up, I was always really interested in the sports science segments that ESPN would run,” Hoth told the Post Bulletin. “I always thought it was so cool how things that I learned and heard about in school were being able to translate into my biggest interest, which is sports. … So I’ve always thought with my eighth-grade students, how could I bring that (into) the classroom to maybe tap into, engage those kids that have similar interests that I had when I was a kid.”

The photo in Holt’s tweet was taken during one of his classes, where he taught students about force pairs, the component of Newton’s Third Law that states “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” by definition.

“I thought, ‘okay, we need a lot of energy when we’re doing this,” Hoth said. “I showed one of the video clips of Kyle Brandt’s angry runs. I was getting all hyped up with it. The kids were like, ‘What is going on right now?’ And then, after the video, we explained, and we slowed it down, and we replayed some of the runs and explained, ‘Hey, what’s actually happening here between a runner that’s planting their feet and the earth?’

“… And then I just had the idea of, ‘hey, let’s get together, let’s take a fun little picture and let’s give him a shout out and see if he’s able to see it.’ Obviously, I was super excited when I saw that he responded. And then obviously thrilled when I had the opportunity to go on (the show).”

In the segment, which is just over nine minutes long, Brandt and the rest of the GMFB hosts interview Hoth on how he incorporates the segment into his teaching. They asked him to break down a few “Angry Runs” clips just as he would during a lesson, who his favorite “Angry Runner” is and also about the Minnesota Vikings decor in his classroom. Hoth ended his interview by shouting out the back-to-back Class 3A football state champions, the Stewartville Tigers.

“The biggest thing with all of this is just to show that, I sometimes find myself getting caught up in the phrase of ‘science can be fun,’” Hoth said. “With everything that goes on in everyday life, like, science is fun, and I just think what we need to do is find a way, and our teachers here do such a great job of making things applicable to real life, but in my realm, in my classroom, is, how can I apply physics and physical science to sports, to reality and to make it fun? Because … science is actually really fun when you learn kind of how it applies to everything that you do.”