Football, decisionmaking, and the brain

One of the many reasons that football is the greatest of all games is that it encompasses every type of decision we humans are capable of. There are the carefully planned decisions coaches make leading up to a game: Who should start? What will our opening plays look like? How can we defend against this scheme? There are snap, in-the-moment athletic judgments: Who has the ball? Is the receiver open? Is the hole inside the guard or outside it, where will the running crease be? And there are what I call "golf swing decisions," which combine the reflective moment with the snap-athletic judgment: When should I snap the ball to time up with the motion man, while still getting off a good snap? I need to blitz through the A gap between guard and center, but what if they are in a slide or gap protection scheme and close that off? Should I try a rip or swim type move? I'm receiver and need to run an out route, but when if the cornerback comes up and jams me and I need to run a go route, how should I use my hands, eyes, etc?

Football shares the need for snap, athletic judgments with most other sports, like basketball or soccer. But it is unique in that every four-to-six second contest is preceded by a complete stop where everyone has some time to collect their thoughts -- or to heighten their anxieties. Baseball has some of this, insofar as pitchers have to think about the type of pitch they want to throw and where, but even if batters could get a handle on the pitchers' rhythm, the human brain cannot rationally break down what a throw is when it is coming in at 90 miles per hour -- it must be an instinctual swing-or-don't-swing response.

In a later post I plan to break down more of the cold, rational, time-intensive decisions and where those decisions break down. I'm interest in which decisions are "predictably irrational," and can they be fixed? Also, what heuristics do coaches and sometimes players use that correctly and incorrectly inform them? But today I limit myself to the raw, instinctual, athletic intelligence that football players must possess or be gone.

Athletic intelligence

Very rarely does a football player use their "rational brain" during a game the way solving a math problem would. Jonah Lehrer, in his book How We Decide, tells a story about Tom Brady. He describes Brady's mindset as an elite quarterback in the pocket which -- especially considering that quarterback is considered maybe the "most intellectually demanding" of all sports positions -- is surprisingly instinctual and unthinking. He drops back and scans his receivers. He gets to one and simply lets the ball go. Brady is asked: "Why did you throw it to that guy?" He replies: "I just felt like he was open." That's it. That's it?

Yes. There really can't be much to it than that. A QB might have an idea of where he might throw it, as his rational brain can do some early legwork, but the ultimate decision is by the emotional, reactive parts of his brain. (Lehrer and others get into the neuroscience of this, which I am not equipped to discuss.) The brain, getting some kind of positive feedback, tells the muscles to release the ball. And how could it be otherwise? These decisions happen much too fast for any person to coldly and rationally walk their way through it. The quarterback must simply know.

(Note that this is not saying that emotional or instinctual intelligence is better than rational intelligence, or vice versa. It is that some situations call for different types of decisionmaking. Indeed, my general assumption is that attempts atrational decisionmaking is usually better (which is in fact not always true), but many times, including in sports, there is no time for some sort of reasoned analysis. Contra this post then with Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.)

This need for amazing decisionmaking that is nevertheless largely reactive is one reason why it is so difficult to evaluate quarterbacks -- or any player. You only get so far by asking Tom Brady "why did you throw it to him" when his answer is "I felt like he was open." And that's with quarterbacks: obviously safeties on defense, or linebackers, or linemen, runningbacks, all rely more or less on this raw emotional intelligence rather than something coolly rational. How do you measure that kind of instictive, non-descriptive intelligence? Yet if a guy doesn't have it, he'll just kill your team with bad "decisions."

Yet what does the NFL use to evaluate its players' intelligences? The Wonderlic Test. Having just seen the above discussion, where not even Tom Brady's athletic intelligence is necessarily rational or describable in the way a mathematician's or philosopher's is, how useful can this test be? Yes, it can help eliminate some total knuckleheads, in that NFL players must learn large playbooks (and in college must be able to stay eligible lest the idea of student-athlete be completely severed), but most of what makes them elite or not is based on how they react.

When a linebacker just knows that a play-action fake is indeed a fake, or that the runningback still has the ball after misdirection from a wide-receiver faking a reverse, he uses very little if any of the skills tested by the Wonderlic. Yet I do sympathize with the NFL: how else can you test this stuff? But what if having a really high rational intelligence not only didn't help or didn't test what made a player good or great, what if a heightened analytical ability made a player worse?

Eli and Peyton Manning and David Foster Wallace

This is where the "golf swing" intelligence can come in; it's also often called "paralysis by analysis." Think about getting ready to swing a golf club while a friend or pro tries to coach you up. "Keep your arms straight." "Turn your hips." "Keep your head down." "Keep the club face square." "Choke down on the club." "Loosen your grip." "Bring your arms through before you start moving your shoulders, but keep your head down." "Keep the club face square but also rotate your wrists so that you finish with a good rotation." Etc. A friend of mine told me that he had one such session, where a pro told him about ten things to do before he swung the club, and then just sat there a minute before swinging. The pro said, "What are you thinking about?" His reply, "All the stuff you just told me."

Now here's a fact you may not know.

Question: Which Manning brother had the higher Wonderlic score?

Answer: Eli. By a long shot.

Peyton's score was perfectly respectable: a 28, higher than average for his position in fact. Eli? A 39, which put him in the 99th percentile of all NFL players -- as well as the 99th percentile of all two-million test takers. As Charlie Wonderlic said of Eli's score, "There's not a job on the planet that requires a person to score at that level." But who would you rather have making decisions for you on gameday? I thought so. Of course, Eli has improved, but there's no question that Peyton is the more consistent decisionmaker. Indeed, all too often Eli looks uncomfortable, like he has overthought the whole process of "just throw the football to the open guy." (Tom Brady, who scored a 33, is also not known as a hyper-analytical guy, though some of that is hearsay.)

And again, this is quarterback, supposedly the marquee thinking-man's position in all of sports. Obviously defensive backs and tight-ends don't need the same level of analytical ability as quarterbacks do. And yet, after games, what kind of questions do reporters ask? You got it: "What were you thinking out there?" "What did it feel like?" And the answers are almost always completely banal (and where they are not they are probably fake): "I just take it one play at a time. Keep doing my best. Focus on the basics, you know." "I'm just really happy. It feels great to contribute. We've all worked really hard."* Really, of what use is it to ask Santonio Holmes what was going through his mind when he leaked out to the corner of the end zone and made a miraculous, extended catch to win the game? "You know, I had been thinking about this great Henry James novel most of the time, but I regained focus when I saw the ball's trajectory and calculated that, based on its particular rotation speed -- as far as I could detect -- I should place my hands in a particular way and I also calibrated my feet so as to minimize the chance that if I slipped I might get any white ink on my shoes so that the ref might call me out." Uh. Holmes was plenty eloquent after the game, but the bottom line is: the ball was in the air and he made a fantastically athletic play. Any analysis might have been counter productive.

The late David Foster Wallace discussed this in a review he did of a biography about tennis prodigy Tracy Austin. I think it well sums up the dilemma that players, coaches and fans have in trying to understand athletic genius, which not only might be distinct from rational genius, it might be the antithesis of it.

It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of [an athlete's] narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis, on the other. Anyone who buys into the idea that great athletes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or at a basketball coach's diagram of a 3-2 zone trap . . . or at an archival film of Ms. Tracy Austin repeatedly putting a ball in a court's corner at high speed fro seventy-eight feet away with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her do it. Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching? . . . .

It is not an accident that great athletes are often called "naturals," because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. . . . They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all. . . .

This is, for me, the real mystery -- whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir [or descriptive post-game interview]. . . . It may be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it -- and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

This seems backed up by experience. Great players do not always make great coaches (or announcers), and often the "smartest" kids are "dumb" athletes. I will finish (for now) with a quote from a friend who is a high school coach, which I think for now provides about as good a summation as any of the awkward interplay between thinking and doing, "such that agent and action are one":

Give me the 2.5 GPA kids. I'll take them all day, everyday. Smart enough to know what's going on, too dumb to know when something is going to hurt, and not smart enough to remember what hurt last time.

*FN: These quotes are also roughly paraphrased from Wallace's fantastic essay, but since it's all so common anyone who has ever seen a post-game interview could fill these in.