THE WRITING ON (AND OFF) THE WALL PHYSICS WITH PIGSKINS.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH

As a well-versed, high-profile professor of physics at the University of Nebraska, Timothy Gay isn't just having a ball. He'd tell you it's more like a fully inflated prolate spheroid.

Through his mind's eye, the game of football is more about Newton's Laws than the neutral zone, about quickly calculating torque and force than keeping track of touchdowns and fumbles.

And, after all is debated and deduced, it's about reinforcing a belief that those who strap on shoulder pads and cushioned helmets might be better suited to be nuclear physicists than most think.

There is plenty in football that can't be explained, but Gay tries, through the Pythagorean theorems, a Cartesian grid and the deep love and respect of a sport that can always teach us something new.

``All of sports are governed by physics, but really, football is the most interesting,'' said Gay, who has authored ``Football Physics: The Science of the Game'' (Rodale, $21.95, 290 pages).

``To start with, there is an adage that the smaller the ball, the better the physics, but I don't agree, simply because of the odd shape of a football. There are so many tumbling and spiral effects on passing and kicking that you don't get with baseball or golf.''

Not to mention the collisions between a bruising fullback and a spry defensive back. To Gay, who earned his Ph.D. in atomic physics from the University of Chicago, life is a series of smashing electrons.

When he was a 6-foot-4, 290-pound offensive lineman at California Institute of Technology in the 1970s, trying to avoid passing out from sucking in too much Pasadena smog during two-a-day practices, he often mulled over basic principles such as how bodies in motion were supposed to remain in motion even while huffing and puffing to stay upright.

It wasn't until he started teaching at football-rich Nebraska in 1993 that his two worlds slammed together. Five years ago, the folks who produce material for the Memorial Stadium's Jumbotron found him to create entertaining and informative vignettes about football physics for the crowd during timeouts. Soon, NFL Films was asking him to do the same.

He quickly realized that if he de-emphasized the scary math part and reintroduced terms and ideas that we've all heard in high school but were too phobic to apply to real life, he could take the game to another level of thinking.

It then made sense to him when a woman from Nebraska called to ask if he could explain the physics of twirling a baton. Before she hung up, she made the quantum leap to thank him for ``bringing physics out of the den of nerds and into the light of day.''

``A football fan knows he loves football, knows the history and the players, but what he may not know are the underlying principles that determine what happen on the field,'' said the energetic Gay, whose other connection to the game was serving as team manager of his high school squad at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., which included Bill Belichick, now the head coach of the two-time Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.

``A coach can tell you how to do these things on the field, and my physical mind can tell you why they work. The common parlance of `getting your bell rung' by a lineman is simply Newton's Second Law in action: Force applied to the body causes it to decelerate. That's just a nice, simple application.''

And how much could all this new know-how pay off, say, for a coach looking for another edge? Gay figures that by understanding more about how balls spin off a punter's foot, or the kinematic aspects of motion, speed and timing in the West Coast offense (which Nebraska players still can't seem to master), a team might rack up six more points every third year. You do the math on that.

But Gay isn't living in a vacuum here. While a physicist always strives to simplify problems, there are many counterintuitive dynamics that get in the way to muck it up. The Immaculate Reception, for instance, where all kinds of mass and acceleration and angular momentum are part of the equation, is simply a play of ``haphazard beauty,'' according to Gay.

``You've got to be careful when someone asks why a running back like Duce Staley is better than another running back,'' said Gay. ``You could point out his lower center of mass, how he can change his velocity vector better or plant harder. But as one of the coaches here always says, if an athlete has the will to win, they'll win. You can't always know why two players, both 6-2 and 190, have a Hall of Fame career and the other doesn't last a season.

``Of course, I could have all the heart in the world and want to win twice as much as Michael Jordan, but I'll never be Michael Jordan. That's where you really have to be careful with this stuff.''

And that's Gay's Primary Principal of Pigskin.

CAPTION(S):

5 photos, box

Photo:

(1) GAY

(2) NICOLLETTE SHERIDAN

(3) KOBE BRYANT

(4) ALEX PADILLA

(5) - Movie director, writer, actor and New York Knicks fan Woody Allen, in the new book, ``Garden of Dreams: Madison Square Garden 125 Years.''

Box:

Sunday PUNCH

- Dana Pennett O'Neil, Philadelphia Daily News