In 2015, star U.S. distance runner Molly Huddle was rounding the final turn of the 10,000 meters at the world championships, almost certain to earn a bronze medal. Runners from Kenya and Ethiopia had just crossed the finish line, and Huddle noticeably eased her stride three steps before her own finish. Exhausted after a punishing race, she put her arms in the air, preparing to celebrate, when, to her horror, American teammate Emily Infeld ducked inside Huddle on her left side. Infeld was still in a full-out kick and captured the final spot on the podium. Huddle immediately screamed an expletive and covered her mouth.
To point out the obvious, she looked wholly defeated. For track fans, it’s still one of the more difficult races to watch (if you happen to possess a heart).
The supposed gaffe was ripe for American take culture, with people who have never in their life walked the equivalent of a 10K—6.2 miles—making a moment about our inclination to celebrate and seek attention rather than finish the job. There came that awfully old-fashioned (and inaccurate) back in my day line of speaking.
Of course, the reality is far more complicated and involves a countless number of neurological responses—some of them involuntary. Huddle went on to PR the event a year later and take bronze in the far more punishing, 26.2-mile New York City Marathon. She is resilient and badass.
Her situation is relevant now, given that the same innocent blunder is plaguing NFL players who, each of the past two weeks, have dropped footballs in celebration before crossing the finish line. The Colts’ Adonai Mitchell did it in Week 4 during a narrow loss to the Rams, and the Cardinals’ Emari Demercado committed the same error this week in a one-point loss to the lowly Titans, prompting what looked to be an incredibly tense moment between the running back and coach Jonathan Gannon on the sideline.
This also happened twice last year, with then Jets (now Browns) wideout Malachi Corley dropping the ball before scoring his first NFL touchdown and Colts running back Jonathan Taylor, who had knifed through the Broncos’ defense, spinning the ball in celebration before crossing the plane. The ball hit outside of the end zone first and wobbled like a dreidel out of bounds, triggering a touchback.
“What we know is that in those moments, our attention narrows and we don’t pick up cues from outside,” says Steve Magness, a coach and author of books that dive deeply into the psychology of sports and human performance. “So that narrowing effect is good, but it also comes at a downside, meaning we’re not as aware of anything outside of what’s in our narrow view of focus, if that makes sense.”
To the greater outside world decrying this specific brain fart, fear not: We found an actual, certified expert on brain farts and what has taken place is not quite what you’d imagine.
Here’s the story of why we celebrate too soon—and why you probably do the same thing every day.
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Daniel Weissman is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. His work has a focus on cognition and cognitive neuroscience. Yes, he is an actual, quoted expert in the field of brain flatulence.
But in this case, Weissman, also a football fan acutely aware of this scourge of end zone droppers, doesn’t think that’s the primary issue at play.
A brain fart, he says, is a lapse in attention. Take, for example, the World War II radar watcher who, over the course of a 16-hour shift, accidentally drifts away from the screen for a moment just in time for an enemy submarine to blip underneath his purview.
“But there’s another related phenomenon,” says Weissman, who has graciously interrupted his lunch on a random Monday to field my phone call. “You may be aware of it. A lot of receivers, they’re wide open and the quarterback’s going to throw him the ball. They’re standing there, the hands are ready to catch the ball, and just before the ball gets there, they turn their eyes away to look in the direction they’re going to run upfield. And then, of course, they drop the ball.”
Weissman calls this a multitasking deficit. That’s what happened to Demercado and Mitchell.
“What’s happening is that the football player has two goals, a kind of current goal and a future goal. The current goal might be to catch the ball or to get the touchdown. If they’re crossing the goal line, the future goal is to, I don’t know, throw the ball, spike the ball after they score, drop it or maybe run upfield.
“And each of these goals, when you think about it, is associated with a number of actions. So, for example, the goal of catching the ball requires that you move your fingers and hands in a certain position that fits the shape of a football and hold them. You have to move your arms to the height of the football. Similarly, crossing the goal line and either dropping or spiking the ball requires you to get ready to move your arm to throw the ball or spike it, or whatever you’re going to do. So goals are associated with different actions, and thinking about a goal can prime or get these actions ready to be executed. So if you start thinking, for example, just before you catch the ball or you’re about to catch the ball, you start thinking, Oh, I got to run upfield, that may activate the goal of turning your eyes toward the upfield and taking them off the ball, right?”
Our internal system executes what are called both top-down actions and bottom-up actions. A top-down action is voluntary, like wondering whether the peaches in your tree outside are ripe, then initiating the process of walking over to check.
Then, there’s a bottom-up occurrence. Say you’re looking at the peach tree, then all of a sudden a wailing siren breaks your concentration, along with flashing lights. Without giving it a conscious thought, you’re searching for the location of the disturbance.
As it relates to dropping the football, there may have been conscious, top-down efforts to run the correct play, break free of defenders, catch the ball and place the ball into a secure location. But the actual sight of the end zone can trigger an involuntary, bottom-up reaction. You see the end zone and your brain thinks, Oh man, great job! From there, a cascading number of great job actions, like Huddle raising her arms and slowing down or Demercado leaning down and dropping the football, are initiated.
Memories of past scores, too, can trigger unconscious, repeat actions. Have you ever gone into a familiar bar or nightclub in a neutral mood, only to find yourself singing or dancing along to the music unwittingly? Bottom-up action. Have you ever walked into a party not planning to drink and found your hand on the keg for no discernable reason? Bottom-up. (Bottoms up?)
“These stimuli tend to activate, in a bottom-up way, goals, which then in turn activate actions. So it could very well be the case, just like in the analogy or the example you gave where [Huddle] is raising their arms, they see the finish line or you’re quitting or like, Oh, job done,” Weissman says. “So the receivers are running almost to the end zone just as they see it. Maybe they pass the last defender, the last umpire that’s not relevant, but the last defender on their way, they know they’re going to score. They’re one yard away from that finish line and the goal of celebrating gets activated by seeing that finish line up close and they suddenly do it.”
Because our brain is a giant prediction machine, one can see how the added stimulus of a goal line, people chasing you, a crowd screaming, the thought of what you might do afterward and the scanning of negative consequences of such a big play can eventually cause what Weissman referred to as “error-related activity.”
It’s incredible, really, to think of all the parts of the brain that could be firing at once. There are subcortical structures involved in reward processing, and these structures can even activate at the anticipation of a reward (Man, I’m gonna get so many likes on Instagram for this). There’s the cerebellum, which is involved in motor planning and coordination (Don’t trip, don’t run out of bounds, check to see if anyone is chasing you). The frontal cortex will scan for errors in real time (Did anyone miss a block?).
Eventually, and worst of all, upon crossing over the goal line without the football, your anterior cingulate cortex projects to the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex.
Message?
Oh boy, we can never do that again.
The paradoxical part of a coach getting mad at a player for dropping the ball before the end zone, or a distance runner for celebrating before crossing the finish line, is that coaches generally want their players to play free. At the height of that freedom, they shouldn’t be overthinking, just reacting. And yet dropping the ball at the goal line is something that could happen only on autopilot.
Magness points out that, in short- or long-distance running, looking over one’s shoulder is considered a cardinal sin.
“[You’re told] it’s wasting energy or you’re giving that person behind you an idea that you’re tired and you’re not going to make it,” he says. “But by doing that, we literally kind of sabotaged ourself because if that girl just takes a quick glance over her shoulder, she realizes, Oh crap, someone’s coming and I need to stay engaged through the line.”
Similarly, in football, how often do we hear the coaching platitude of “playing fast” or “playing free” or “having the game slow down.” These are all indications that someone has entered a state where the kind of actions we would normally think about have become so engrained in our mental process that they no longer warrant conscious communication. No longer does a receiver have to say before a quick slant, “One, two, three steps, O.K. now pivot.” He just arrives.
I would guess that coaches in Indianapolis or Arizona would rather the continuation of a player’s comfortability and flow than to create an arduous and exhaustive overthinking process.
“We have some stairs in front of our house, and I do feel like the process of walking down them is on autopilot and I actually won’t fall down because I don’t even need to attend to it mentally,” Weissman says. “I just automatically go down the stairs, kind of. But I think actually having something be autopilot might actually be helpful.”
This is why many of the Day 2 stories about dropping the ball miss the point. We wonder if blame lies in coaches who did or did not tell players about the Mitchell incident, or the Corley incident, or the Taylor incident, or DeSean Jackson way back in 2008, as if that would be a determining factor.
However, it has nothing to do with discussion and more about conditioning. The better question for Gannon and the Cardinals would be whether, in the preseason, players are monitored through the goal line on every score during practice. Are there enough repetitions where the act of carrying a ball completely past the goal line occurs in order to override the potential for millions of conflicting stimuli to show up in the wrong moment?
And even then, there is no telling when an error message can finally and fatally arise.
Which, ultimately, ushers in the most important part of preventing future occurrences, which is forgiving those that have already taken place. While we don’t know what Gannon was saying to Demercado (he did say he apologized the following day), the expert remedy is something closer to a hug. Demercado’s teammate, Paris Johnson Jr., seemed to get this instinctively.
Johnson, who was the first to run over and console Demercado, told reporters afterward: “I didn’t want him to hear any of that. I didn’t want to create that [bad] energy around him.”
“Because once it’s traumatic,” Magness says, “… now what is it? It’s a traumatic experience, and whether the guy thinks it is or not, your brain ingrains it as super negative. Avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid. And now instead of being able to trust yourself to perform, you’re thinking every step.”
To think or not to think, to plan or not to plan, to check or not to check. It’s the eternal struggle faced by those who perform for a living. That’s why, for those on the outside looking in, only compassion makes sense when the process itself cannot be totally understood or forever mastered.
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