Site Info & FAQ

How do you measure the distance of the throws?

We go frame by frame to measure the distance from release until the exact moment a ball falls to shoulder height. We needed to introduce some level of standardization, as some throws we evaluate are hit with a leaping players' arms in the air and other throws we look at fall to the ground. After extensively working on this, we've determined measuring until shoulder height is most reliable, and that the mild differences in "shoulder height" of players are miniscule enough in this context to ignore. It's much easier to estimate shoulder height across circumstances than other potential metrics, such as the distance traveled were all throws to fall to the ground. Since balls are released approximately at shoulder height as well, this also offers a nice symmetry.

Many videos are shot at angles; we do our best to determine the yard-lines, but there's a level of subjectivity involved.

How do you find the throws?

Throws were located via a mix of crowdsourcing, Googling, and being huge football fans ourselves. While we think our search has been pretty complete, and we've checked with a number of people + sources, we definitely could be missing a throw that should be on our site. If you know of one, shoot us an email!

Why do you do this? Do you make money?

There's no ads or profit from this at all. We're just big football fans, nerded out about this a few times over the years, and decided to make this a thing we are dedicated to systematically tracking on this website. We can confidentally say that no other source tracks this systematically nor has nearly the portfolio of longest throws that we do.