It’s almost football season (in the USA), which means it’s about that time I bore everyone to death with my little ditty about the sacred numbers of the standard football field.

It’s important to me, because even though the TV people never mention it, the length of the “in-bounds” part of the “gridiron” is 360 feet, and the number of degrees in a circle is 360:

The NFL was in the news recently, but not in a happy way. On July 28, mass-casualty shooting took place when a guy drove all the way from Nevada to New York City only to go to the NFL’s headquarters to shoot up the place.

Something about this had been bothering me ever since, but I couldn’t see it. After all, there is so much bullshit going on these days that we’re all on overload. And, heck, mass shootings with assault rifles are not even shocking anymore. Nothing is more sacred in Uncle Sam’s domain than sports and violence, after all, so it only made sense that some senseless violence visited the NFL.

I’m not a mathematician, but something about math gives me a sense of security about the world. Math is concrete, and predictable. I know, I’m a wacko, but math is how we measure everything, and math almost always demystifies the world.

Math is a symbolic language as well. I like symbols. Math symbols are all around us all the time, so apprehending the essence of those symbols helps me stay sane, and sanity is at a premium these days.

In this NYC NFL shooting, what intrigued the math-symbolism part of me is the address: 345 Park Avenue.

Those digits are the basic dimensions of the triangle we were taught (back in the old days) is the Pythagorean Theorem, which geometry buffs like to call a “3-4-5 Triangle,” as it wasn’t really a discovery of Pythagoras. (Pythagoras was a notorious glory hog, I guess.)

The gist of this particular triangle is that the hypotenuse is always the sum of the squares of the other two sides, and in the 3-4-5 example, all the numbers are integers:

a² + b² = c²
3² + 4² = 5²
9 + 16 = 25

As you know, because you studied the first graphic closely, the width of a football field is 160 feet, and 160 is 16×10. Something is up, right? Does the Pythagorean Theorem have anything to do with the NFL gridiron? Could a certain number of 3-4-5 triangles be arranged within the gridiron’s dimensions that is also an integer?

The answer is, of course, YES! The distance from the back of the endzone to the 30 yard line is 120 feet, and 120 is 1/3 of the 360 length. The dimensions are scalable:

120² + 160² = 200²
14400 + 25600 = 40000

A minimum of six 3-4-5 triangles fit inside of the NFL gridiron:

How many points does a football player get when he scores a touchdown? (The answer is 6, ladies.) How many points are a field goal? Three – the number of corners on a triangle, and half of six. Pretty clever, eh?

BUT, it doesn’t stop there. My fans may remember me recently going on (and on) about that 2001: A Space Odyssey film, and how the spooky monolith was a specific size that measured, according to the book version by Arthur C. Clarke:

1² × 2² × 3²
(1 foot thick, 4 feet wide, and 9 feet tall)

4 by 9 looks like this:

That basic 2² × 3² is also the aspect ratio of the film: 1:2.25, as seen here:

As it happens, the ratio of 1:2.25 = 4:9 also equals 160:360. Yes, the monolith is a similitude of the football gridiron! And, we can again fit six 3-4-5 triangles in that monolith, just like we did with the gridiron:

So, what kind of games are these people playing with us? Was the NFL only in that building because of the address? Was Stanley Kubrick somehow a big American football fan? Will Jupiter be getting an expansion franchise?

I asked HAL, and it said that no explicit sports symbolism is present in 2001: ASO. Hrmpf!

Therefore: what we have here is non-simultaneous symbolic apprehension of a universal geometrical pattern. How else could two such divergent realms stumble into the same matrix? Maybe the answer lies within Mel Brooks’ film Spaceballs?

345 = 3 × 5 × 23

There are other things going on with the 3-4-5 triangle that should be gleaned. 345 has only three prime factors: 3, 5, and 23. The 23 is a favorite of the aficionados of writer and humorist Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson’s fame reached an apex with his Illuminatus! series of books, which were about conspiracy theories.

Prime numbers are always a bit magical. The interior angles of a 3-4-5 triangle can be approximated to 37° and 53°, which are both prime numbers in the decimal. Interestingly, the 5 side and the 3 side make the 53° angle.

One long-standing conspiracy theory claims that the proto-Freemasons encoded the 53 in William Shakespeare’s First Folio, and from that one can locate the lost treasure of the Knights Templar at Oak Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada (take your pick). This rabbit hole involves the inimitable John Dee, who knew a bit about the geometry.

My favourite freemasonic 3-4-5 has to be the claim by David Ovason, in Secret Architecture (pp. 256-63, 345-50), that the reason Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC was platted at an angle was to “point to” a heavenly 3-4-5 triangle on August 10 of 1791, formed by the stars Regulus, Spica, and Arcturus. Well, maybe it’s not a perfect 3-4-5, but Ovason is keen to tell us that Euclidean geometry was central to the Enlightenment obsessions of the founding fathers.

Perhaps less complicated is the fact that a deck of playing cards has 53 units – 13 cards from each suit and one Joker, which may have evolved from the null-valued and wild “Fool” card in the tarot, but probably not.

And, who can forget that Disney slapped a 53 on a VW back in the 60s and called it a “Love Bug”:

I don’t know what to make of this:

The 53 is a number ubiquitous in USA industry as the standard maximum length of a semi trailer. Again, this results from a 52, as the standard shipping skid is 4 feet by 3 feet, which means we can shove two rows of 13 skids into the box and have a foot left over.

Every standard trailer has to have this “53” stamped on it. That’s a nice way to make sure there are 53’s everywhere. But, don’t take my word for it that there’s a big 53 conspiracy. Sometimes the freemasonic square-and-compass has a 53° angle:

I got that graphic from this site, that for some reason, thinks the compass angle is 48°, even though one can see on their own graphic that it is at a 53° angle. Go figure! In any event, the only reason to spread the compass at 53° is to imply a 3-4-5 triangle.

Four 53’s brings us to the boiling point of water: 212°. I don’t know if this means anything, but that new Pope they got over there in Italy, well, he’s actually from the south side of Chicago, and grew up in this house:

The house was put up for sale earlier this year, after it became famous, but it didn’t fetch much in terms of offers. The city of Dolton ended up buying it for $375,000 and will open it to the public.

I hope Leo XIV prays for the Bears this year as they take to the 3-4-5 gridiron. They need all the help they can get. “Papa Bear” George Halas was a staunch Catholic, so maybe the stars will align?

►Ed