The widespread claims during the Super Bowl run-up that the always crafty New England Patriots let some air pressure out of the footballs they use on offense in order to reduce fumbles and make it easier for Tom Brady to throw the ball reminds me that the official NFL football (and to an ever so slightly lesser extent, the official college football) is awkwardly huge in diameter.

I’m as tall as the average NFL quarterback, but my hands aren’t big enough to grip an NFL ball well. I can hold and thus throw a junior high school-sized football fine, but an NFL-sized ball is likely to slip out of my grasp.

Here’s Jonathan Bales arguing, using data from 2008 onward, that the obsession with tall quarterbacks is likely missing much of the reason why height is a decent predictor of quarterback success: height tends to correlate with hand size:

There’s a much stronger correlation between hand size and both approximate value and completion rate than there is between height and those stats. Short Quarterbacks Who Thrive If hand size really matters more than height for quarterbacks, we’d expect two things to be true: over the long run, 1) tall quarterbacks with abnormally small hands will struggle and 2) short quarterbacks with abnormally large hands will thrive. Again, that’s going to be difficult to prove conclusively because there’s not a huge sample of hand measurements pre-2008, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is the case. Looking back on the short quarterbacks who have excelled in the NFL, many of them have really big hands for their height. Consider that the NFL average for quarterback hand size is currently 9.6 inches. Well, some of the top “short” quarterbacks (6’2” or shorter) of the past decade have ridiculously large hands—Drew Brees (10.25 inches), Russell Wilson (10.25 inches), Brett Favre (10.38 inches). There are also countless tall quarterbacks with small hands who were drafted highly and failed to live up to expectations. Small-Handed Quarterbacks Who Excel There are some quarterbacks with small hands who have bucked the trend to play well in the NFL, too. But as I studied those quarterbacks, it became clear that the majority have one thing in common—mobility. Some of the top small-handed quarterbacks to play in the past decade include Michael Vick (historically small 8.5-inch hands), Colin Kaepernick (9.13 inches), Robert Griffin III (9.5 inches), Daunte Culpepper (9.5 inches), Aaron Rodgers (9.38 inches), and Tony Romo (8.86 inches). All of those passers are either runners or have well above-average mobility in the pocket. Romo is the least athletic by far, but even he has been able to work wizardry in the pocket at times to buy time for receivers. Thus, I think what we’re seeing here is that quarterbacks either need to have above-average hand size or above-average mobility to ultimately do what passers need to do to win—deliver the football with accuracy. If you aren’t going to be able to stand in the pocket and consistently throw the ball accurately like Peyton Manning, you better be able to move around, buying time to make those throws easier. When quarterbacks have both traits—like Russell Wilson, for example—it’s perhaps a really strong sign that they’re going to perform above expectations in the NFL.

Say they reduced the diameter of the football by an almost imperceptible 5% or 10%. That sounds like it would dramatically increase the number of young men who could throw decently. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? I tend to think it would be good to open up quarterback competition a little more broadly, especially at the high school level.

I have a prejudice against our society’s prejudices in favor of tallness, huge hands, or other genetic characteristics that are more random than generally beneficial. For example, if everybody in the future were one standard deviation smarter or healthier, that would be good overall. If everybody in the future were one standard deviation taller, that would probably just use up more food, increase cancer rates, make people less agile, and generally be a waste.

In the past, height correlated well with how well you were fed as a child and so forth. So it was a decent marker of good upbringing, relatives with resources, and other positive markers on the marriage market. But now most people born in America don’t lack for food as children, so it’s largely a Nature trait mimicking an old Nurture trait. And I don’t see any broad value in everybody being genetically taller.

It’s interesting that American sports generally don’t like fiddling with the ball, while international soccer typically rolls out a new ball with new playing characteristics at each World Cup, which leads to embarrassing plays on global television where the world’s best players fail to anticipate how the new ball will handle. The FIFA tradition seems odd to me: wouldn’t you want to introduce a new soccer ball a few years before the World Cup so everybody is expert with it by the quadrennial showcase?

But the American tradition of almost never changing the ball also seems extreme.