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What’s the harder road: an athlete winning an Olympic gold medal or the New England Patriots getting back to the Superbowl? In my last post, this was one of the questions I promised to explore in upcoming blogs and it is a uniquely psychological puzzle.
On a lot of levels solving this puzzle comes down to motivation. According to a recent article for Black Belt Magazine, written sports psychologist Randy Borum, a professor of in the Department of Mental Health, Law and Policy at the University of Florida, there are three kinds of attributions that typically effect motivation.
The first is known as “stability,” which measures whether a past performance was caused by some permanent (stable) factor like say, a lack of coordination, or an unstable factor: a wet playing field that led to this lack of coordination (unstable).
The second is “locus of causality”—whether a specific performance is was caused by an internal factor (say a heightened sense of self-confidence) or an external factor (say a great speech by the coach before the game).
The third is “the locus of control”—meaning a given performance resulted from something one controls, like preparation, or something beyond one’s control, like the football field being covered with snow.
Obviously, motivation theory is an incredibly well-developed psychological field and these three categories merely skim the surface, but they’re a good place to start answering the Olympics v. Superbowl challenge.
What’s interesting about is that, according to most football coaches, their job is to try and limit many of these factors. Take ‘locus of control.’ A good coach is going to try to control the entire game. Bill Belicheck, the Patriot’s coach, believes that the secret to football is figuring out what the other team likes to do and then taking away that option. His feeling is that the way to win is to make the other side uncomfortable.
The best example of this came from his first Superbowl win, where he fielded what he openly admits was a worse team against “the greatest show on turf:” the St. Louis Rams.
The Rams quarterback, Kurt Warner, was an expert at throwing a deadly accurate ball into impossible situations and most teams, when they played the Rams, did so by trying to limit Warner.
Belicheck, instead, decided to key on running back Marshall Faulk. There were lots of reasons for this, but the principle one was the Faulk was Warner’s easy out. If the quarterback got into trouble—no receivers were open, the play broke down, whatever— he would dump off to Faulk. In other words, the thing that made the Rams most comfortable was they had one of the best insurance policies in the history of football in Faulk. And without that policy, they just weren’t themselves.
And in a game like the Superbowl, not being yourself, is all the edge Belicheck needed for victory. This may not sound like much, but Ron Jaworski, former Eagles quarterback and current ESPN analyst, considers this the greatest coaching performance in the history of football and many consider Jaworski the best football analyst in the game.
Either way, the point here is that football, because it is the most complete team game around, doesn’t function according to typical rules of motivation. Certainly, all of the above factors play a part, but the strategy portion of the program and the fact that every player on the field has to understand and execute that strategy perfectly for a team to usually win, makes our starting question even stranger.
For Olympic athletes (I’m ignoring basketball and hockey to make this statement), coaching is less about game strategy (certainly there is basic how-to-pace yourself kinds of strategy) than about peak performance strategy. An Olympic swimmer, say Michael Phelps, isn’t worried about his opponents coach figuring out a way to alter his stroke motion, he’s simply worried about executing that motion in the best way possible.
So while I haven’t yet come to my conclusion, I do believe that the chess match of football presents a host of psychological problems that greatly exceed the motivational concerns of most Olympic athletes and this should make the repeat harder than the gold. Not everyone agrees with me. Check out the next blog for the contrarian opinions.
