With my appreciation for sports alongside the world of STEM, the article, “Grab and Go: How Sticky Gloves Have Changed Football” by The New York Times discussing how sticky gloves changed the NFL was a no brainer. This article explained how the advancing in technology and engineering not only gave us a better product regarding the game, but it also shows the futuristic approach the scientist and engineers possessed to bring about the generational change. Prior to modern day gloves, football players were essentially wearing mittens to catch footballs. Understanding that the exterior of the football was always pigskin, the did not make matters easy attempting to catch. Developed in the 1990’s, utilizing grippy polymer which is about 20% stickier than human hands made those impossible one handed catches viewed by folks of the pass, seamlessly a thing of ease.

 

The images shown with the articles showed multiple examples of spectacular one-handed catches made by various ages of athletes. This in a major help convey the validation of the sticky gloves truly being the force to make difficult passes easier. It also had an image from a M.I.T. laboratory that correlates to the scientific and statistical truth of experimentation to bring more validation. Having all these visual supporting evidence, with statistical proof of their argument, the overall intent of the article was clearly acknowledged. Which in fact was to show how one minor change in the material of an even smaller aspect of being a football player changed the game forever.