I notice in football, many a defensive player makes a sack and then goes into a celebration while there’s a loose ball lying on the turf waiting to be recovered. In basketball, a player will score, celebrate, and then not get back on defense, so his team allows an easy basketball. In baseball, many a hitter will stand at the plate after hitting the ball a long way and lose out on extra bases because he didn’t run hard.
For some defenders, the task was “sack the quarterback.” Mission accomplished. His emotional system immediately switches states from pursuit to triumph. He flexes, points, dances, looks toward the sideline or searches for a camera. Meanwhile the football, which determines possession of the game, may be sitting three feet away.
The coach’s conception of the task is different. The task was “win the play.” If the quarterback fumbled, the sack was merely an intermediate event. Recovering the ball can be worth vastly more than the sack.
A player hits a difficult three. The crowd erupts. He poses, gestures or exchanges something with the opposing bench. Meanwhile basketball has already resumed. His team is playing four against five.
The batter believes he has hit a home run. He watches it. The ball hits the wall. Something that might have been a triple becomes a double, or a double becomes a single. Occasionally a hitter admires a ball that stays in the park and barely reaches first.
There are several internal forces underneath this.
The first is premature cognitive closure. Human action tends to be organized around goals. Once the brain recognizes a goal as completed, attention disengages. Athletes are especially vulnerable because elite performance requires extremely compressed goal structures: beat the blocker, get to the quarterback, make the shot, square up the pitch. That narrow focus is usually an advantage. For a fraction of a second after apparent success, it becomes a liability.
I’m not a huge fan of setting goals because they tend to narrow your horizons and tempt you to cheat.
During the play, the athlete is operating under intense concentration and physiological arousal. Success releases that tension instantaneously. Celebration is almost a neurological exhale. The player has to override that impulse and maintain task attention despite receiving every internal signal that says, “You did it.”
Then there is status signaling. Professional athletes are simultaneously playing the game and performing before an audience. A sack, dunk, three-pointer or long home run is an athletic accomplishment and a public reputation event. The celebration tells teammates, opponents, spectators and cameras: that was me.
Recovering a loose football is enormously valuable to the team. Performing a memorable sack celebration may be more valuable to the individual’s visibility. A spectacular three followed by a gesture can become a social-media clip. Sprinting silently back on defense probably will not. Watching your 440-foot home run carries cultural meaning. Sprinting out of the box because there is a 3 percent chance it hits the fence carries little prestige.
Television intensifies it. Sports broadcasts isolate individual achievements. Cameras find the scorer. Replays focus on the dunk, sack or home run. Social media then extracts those few seconds from the game. The athlete increasingly inhabits two contests at once: the contest on the field and the contest for attention.
A defender can create a magnificent highlight while simultaneously reducing his team’s chance of winning because he stopped playing. From the standpoint of spectacle he succeeded. From the standpoint of the game he failed.
There is another problem peculiar to elite athletes: they are extraordinarily good at prediction. An NBA player usually knows when his shot is going in. An NFL defender often knows whether the quarterback has been brought down. A major-league hitter usually knows what a home-run swing feels like.
Usually.
Their expertise encourages them to begin responding to their prediction instead of waiting for reality. The spectacular mistakes are the tiny fraction of cases in which the prediction is wrong. The basketball player turns toward the crowd before the shot actually drops. The baseball player knows he got all of it until the wind holds it up. The defender knows the play is dead although nobody has recovered the football.
This explains one of coaching’s most repetitive clichés: “Finish the play.”
It sounds banal because the intellectual content is trivial. Every professional athlete knows that you should recover a fumble, run out a hit and get back on defense.
Coaches are trying to extend the athlete’s definition of the play by another two or three seconds.
Football coaches teach players to run toward loose balls even when they think the play has been whistled dead. Baseball coaches teach hitters to run hard until the ball’s status becomes certain. Basketball coaches obsess over transition defense after made baskets because the psychological temptation is strongest precisely after success.
Failure often follows excellence. The player does something difficult enough to produce an emotional reward, and that reward interferes with the elementary action immediately afterward.
Regular people often devote enormous attention to difficult, prestigious actions and surprisingly little attention to mundane completion. Someone gives a brilliant presentation and forgets to send the follow-up email. A surgeon performs the technically difficult portion of an operation and someone misses a routine checklist item. A lawyer wins the argument and overlooks the filing deadline. The glamorous component receives attention because it feels like the achievement. The boring remainder determines whether the achievement actually counts.
From a coach’s perspective, losing because the opponent was better is tolerable in a way that losing because somebody celebrated 1.8 seconds too early cannot be. The latter represents free expected value thrown away.
That may explain why coaches are disproportionately obsessed with behaviors spectators regard as trivial: running through first base, handing the ball to the official, touching every base, falling on the football, sprinting back after a basket, knowing the down and distance, knowing the number of outs.
Championship-level discipline consists partly of refusing to declare victory a few seconds before victory has occurred.
