The Pigskin Professor, Engineering Around Us

Professor Tony Schmitz combined his love of football with mechanical engineering in a series of episodes that showed how engineering pervades our daily lives. These videos, which were shown during the six home football games for the 2003 season, reached a diverse audience of over 84,000 fans at each game and provided a unique opportunity to discuss engineering in a high-profile forum. Using amusing classroom and gridiron-based scenarios, the Pigskin Professor cleverly demonstrated how engineering processes and results permeate our daily existence.

The highly entertaining episodes highlighted topics including: nanotechnology, light energy, heat transfer, and kinetic energy. Project principals included Tony Schmitz (writer and on-camera talent), Greg Sawyer (on-camera foil), Arturo Sinclair (director and animator), Marc Hoit (producer), Joella Walz (associate producer) and James Oliverio (executive producer).