DECEMBER 2021 39but run the 40 in times that compare favorably with old-
school wide receivers’. The pocket, the quarterback’s oasis,
has become a feeding ground for apex predators.
Before a series of beautiful and strange circumstances
brought the likes of Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Dak Prescott,
Mahomes, Josh Allen, Jackson, Murray and Justin Herbert
into the football world, the species was threatened. A grow-
ing mediocrity had taken hold, with a few well-coached,
archetypal pocket passers fighting back a wave of new
defenses that threatened to reprise the touchdown-scarce
NFL of the 1960s and ’70s.
In the wild, circumstances like these are how a species
either reaches extinction or avoids that fate by evolv-
ing. “It’s like Jurassic Park—life finds a way, right?” says
Shane Campbell-Staton, an assistant professor of evo-
lutionary biology at Princeton. “At the same time, some
species are going extinct. They are. But that is also part
of evolutionary change.”
Campbell-Staton has studied
the effect of urbanization on
the anole lizard in Puerto Rico
and the surge of tuskless
female elephants emerging in
central Mozambique follow-
ing the civil war. His work has
centered on the phenomenon
that as the human race hurls
curveballs at the plants, fish,
birds, insects and mammals in
this world, some f ind a way to
overcome in a matter of a few
short years.
The lizards in Puerto Rico?
They ventured into the heat of
big cities and, over the course
of a generation, sprouted lon-
ger limbs to adapt to the f lat,
smooth surfaces. They grew
larger toe pads so they could
better cling to concrete and
metal. They got noticeably
faster than their forest coun-
terparts to avoid humans and
cars racing through streets.
The elephants of southeast
Africa? In just a single genera-
tion, those that survived the
country’s brutal 15-year con-
f lict, ending in the early 1990s,
began producing female off-
spring with no tusks at a rate
of 33.0%, as opposed to 18.5%. This was a response to
poachers’ increased hunting and killing elephants for their
ivory to purchase arms and other supplies for the war.
Around the start of the century, quarterbacks were deal-
ing with their own man-made challenges to survival. Notever expected. The same can be said for quarterbacks
who, after years of stagnancy and groupthink, are opening
their minds to achieve stunning results.
“This is a little bit different than how [Charles] Darwin
envisioned evolution, which was a slow, gradual change
over time,” says Hopi Hoekstra, a world-renowned pro-
fessor of organismic and evolutionary biology and of
molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “We definitely
know that evolution can act in a burst.”
T
HINK OF QUARTERBACK as its own species, and
consider how hellish its natural habitat has become
over the past three decades. There used to be only one
Lawrence Taylor, a speed pass rusher who could not be
contained by a single blocker—now there’s at least one on
almost every team. Defensive backs have gotten taller and
faster. Defensive tackles are 35 pounds heavier on average
GROUND CONTROL
The Foot Pop ( below) generates more
force from the ground up, leading to
faster core movements compared with
traditional mechanics (above).