Everything You Need to Know About the Omega Football

Learn how game-changing tech breakthroughs helped Wilson LABS create the best-performing football on the market.

2023 marks the beginning of a new era in football technology as Wilson LABS launches the Omega football. The never-before-seen tech in the Omega helps players get the most out of their throws, thanks largely to the weight redistribution within the ball. By moving weight to the middle of the ball, Wilson LABS engineers were able to produce a dramatic increase in the ball’s spin rate. And a higher spin rate equals better performance.

How did this game-changing innovation come about? The challenge Wilson LABS engineers faced was creating a ball that would perform better than our already high-performing footballs while maintaining the same specs (weight, size, durability) as our other Wilson high school and college ball players have come to know and love.

Since the overall weight of the ball couldn’t change, the team knew they would have to redistribute the existing weight throughout the ball. Luckily, the LABS team knew a little something about weight distribution and moment of inertia‒a relationship that is crucial to many Wilson LABS innovations, like the Trinity tennis ball and the Triad golf ball.

The moment of inertia can be defined as a measure of an object's resistance to rotation.

So the team went to work manipulating the weight distribution inside the football. And eventually (spoiler alert), it worked. But there’s more to it than that. Read on for the true story of how the Omega came to be.

OMEGA’S KEY FEATURES

REVTECH

The internal construction, specifically the redistribution of weight to the center of the ball, is the most important feature. The result of the redistributed weight is increased spin on every throw.

Daniel Hare, a Research and Development Manager at Wilson LABS, spent several years creating this ball with his team.

"A good analogy for how you might want to compare Omega to other things is a figure skater going into a spin,” explained Hare. “The figure skater's weight remains the same, she has her arms out, spinning fairly slowly, and as she pulls her arms closer to her body, she speeds up— faster, faster, faster— that is what we have done. We took a ball with a bunch of weight on the outside, normal construction, that spun at its given rate. We took that ball and pulled some of that weight towards the middle… it spins faster and faster.”

RAPID BREAK-IN LEATHER

The leather has been pre-treated in our factory. When the ball comes out of the box, the coloring will be darker, the ball will be easier to break in, and it will maintain its pebble grain for longer, giving you maximized grip. To break in the Omega football quickly, all you need to do is brush the ball, and you will feel the softness immediately.

PRIME STITCHING

The stitching of the Omega looks similar to our GST Prime; however, we have tweaked a few stitching angles to fit your hand better. We doubled the stitching from the Prime to give double the grip for off-lace throws and ball security.

METALLIC STAMP TECHNOLOGY

The Omega uses metallic stamp technology for all of the graphics‒the same technology featured on the NFL Shield Game Balls for the past couple of years. The advantage of a metallic stamp is that the coloring and sheen of the ball remain the same after the ball is prepped, giving Omega the same logo integrity that you see on our NFL Game Ball.

WHY SPIN RATE MATTERS

MORE AERODYNAMIC

Why is it beneficial to have the football spin at a higher rate? Hare said, “If a ball is spinning faster, then it’s easier to cut through the air, so with the given spiral efficiency, it can hold its shape a little bit longer. Bottom line is that it can cut through the air easier, more aerodynamically.”

REQUIRES LESS EFFORT

Not only is Omega more aerodynamic, but the effort the player has to put behind their throw to bring the ball up to speed is lessened. This change is apparent in both the angular velocity data and the physicalities of the ball.

By requiring less effort to get to its target, the Omega enables players to throw the ball harder and farther to make even better throws.

LIGHTER FEEL

“The Omega actually feels lighter, it feels easier to come out of your hand, and a lot of people start to notice that difference over time,” explained Hare.

The way the outer weight was redistributed is from a slightly modified version of the ball liner. It is slightly lighter, less dense, and more pliable.

“If you were to fill an Omega to 13 psi and compare it to our standard ball at 13 psi, the Omega feels softer, easier to flex— people say just from their touch it feels like there is less air in the Omega,” said Hare.

“You don’t even need to throw the ball to feel the difference, which is pretty neat.”

THE OMEGA ORIGIN STORY

You can’t talk about Omega without first talking about the Wilson QBX Connected System‒a data acquisition system that puts numbers to numerous elements of a throw.

The sensors don't interfere with any aspect of ball behavior, such as spin, weight, or velocity. Connected can record valuable throw metrics such as spiral efficiency— how tight your spiral is, spin rate— how fast your ball is spinning, release time— the time between the start of the throwing motion and when the ball leaves the hand, and velocity— the speed of the ball as it leaves the hand of the QB.

This data allows players to take a snapshot of their current level of performance, identify benchmarks for improvement, and measure their progress over time. Or, in the case of the Omega, it can be used to measure the ball’s performance compared to other models.

Anonymized data showcasing the consistent Spiral Efficiency results amongst the different ball types

“We can throw multiple different versions of our footballs, take two that weigh the same, the same size, throw them side by side, and the one with the new technology tends to win out as far as spin rate is concerned,” said Hare.

While developing the Omega, Hare and his team analyzed the initial data provided by QBX Connected and began to investigate the effect that the size, weight, and weight distribution of a football has on the arm of a player.

How do two footballs with the same mass but two different moments of inertia compare? Can we increase performance or spiral efficiency by changing the physical attributes of the ball?

They began by breaking down the ball, measuring each individual element, comparing parts side by side and then discussing how to execute building a more innovative ball.

“We knew if we wanted to add weight to the middle of the ball, but we wanted to keep the overall weight of the ball the same, we had to take something out,” explained Hare. So at first, they tried cutting holes in various patterns into the liner of the ball.

Left: A close-up view of a liner cut-out design. Right: A view of what one of the cutout patterns looked like in a fully constructed ball.

The trouble with cutting into the liner of the ball was the negative effect it had on durability. “We spent a solid two years testing different structures by launching the ball at a brick wall to see what survived and what didn’t,” said Hare.

“It was version after version… What types of materials do we put in there? Do we put other structures inside the ball to create a stronger cage? Different types of meshes, strings, fabrics?”

The remains of a large set of footballs after going through the internal destructive testing process.

And then they had a breakthrough. Chris Kahle, a manufacturing engineer at Wilson’s football factory in Ada, Ohio, figured out a better way to make the ball durable by welding a flexible weighted tag into the core of the ball.

Left: Render of an early version of the internal tag design and orientation. Right: Low-resolution rough mockup of the ball cut-through showing the liner pattern, internal weight, and sensor.

“This is the most amount of weight we can shift that we feel comfortable with— without damaging the ball's durability or performance,” explained Hare.

The Omega is a ball that should make every player excited and confident when they have it in their hand. It is the best of the best on the market.

Blake Rus, Senior Marketing Manager at Wilson, explained, “The Omega is proof of Wilson’s category innovation that no one else is doing in this space. We are continuing to innovate against our own products. We already make the most technologically advanced products in the market, but we have continued to build on that year in and year out with what Dan and his team are doing.”

THE SCIENCE BEHIND OMEGA

“Momentum is the name of the game,” said Hare. For this ball, we are looking at the equation behind angular momentum.

The moment of inertia and spin rate are inversely related. So by decreasing the moment of inertia, we are able to increase the angular velocity, the spin rate— represented as Omega (Ω).

Hare explained further, “The conservation of angular momentum says that if you apply a given amount of energy to a football, and you are trying to make it spin more, the lower the moment of inertia you have, the higher the ball's spin rate can be.”

Our NFL Game Ball is a good example of this property. For the NFL game ball, we increased the moment of inertia, and the spin rate of the ball decreased. The moment of inertia is higher in the NFL Game Ball because the weight is largely distributed on the outer ends of the ball.

“The NFL game ball is cut to a slightly larger size than a typical high school or college football, which means that there is more weight located further away from the center of the ball,” said Hare. “This resulting higher MOI means that the NFL ball actually tends to spin at a slower rate than some of our other footballs for a given QB.”

Since we are not manipulating the overall ball's mass, we can manipulate MOI by shifting the location of weight distribution. If you place more weight in the center of the ball, the faster it will spin. The more the weight is evenly distributed to the outer regions of the ball, the slower the spin rate.

Anonymized data showcasing the significant jump in Spin Rate for a given velocity.

The Omega is currently being thrown at Auburn University, The University of Findlay, and Ohio Northern University‒football programs that were integral in playtesting the ball. Now that the design is perfected, Wilson LABS will release the Omega on Wilson.com in 2023, and the ball will be exclusively sold on Wilson.com.

Wondering what people are saying about Omega? Check out these articles from Forbes and Sports Techie.

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Make sure to follow @wilsonfootball to lock in on all things football & keep an eye out for the Omega!

Updated February 23, 2023