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PROVO — “If you have two starting quarterbacks you don’t have one,” goes the adage. BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall tested the veracity of this saying in 2010, when he named both Jake Heaps and Riley Nelson starters in the season-opener against Washington.
Knowing full well that he was ignoring decades of conventional football wisdom, Mendenhall hoped to prove the critics wrong. He undoubtedly took comfort (as did the fans) in the result of the first game, a 23-17 victory over the Huskies. Oddly enough, Heaps and Nelson each threw for 131 yards.
Coaches and athletes, like entrepreneurs, tend to be more optimistic than the general population. Competitive people like to challenge the status quo and don’t easily take “no” for an answer. Their paychecks depend on outsmarting and outperforming their opponents each week. Sometimes conventional wisdom has a finite life. (See LaVell Edwards challenging football’s run-first, run-later, run-always mentality.) But sometimes, conventional wisdom shouldn’t be ignored.
After the opening win against Washington, the 2010 Cougars went on to lose five of the next six games. By the end of the season, coach Mendenhall had scrapped the dual-quarterback system, acknowledging that neither Heaps nor Nelson — due to splitting practice repetitions — was getting enough individual repetitions to succeed.
Repetitions are crucial, but just how important?
Two decades ago, researchers at MIT devised a study that evaluated the cognitive abilities of rats. According to Charles Duhigg, author of “The Power of Habit,” researchers placed rats at the bottom of a T-shaped maze and placed chocolate at the top-left corner of the maze. The rats could apparently smell the chocolate but weren’t sure to how find it. Sniffing and scratching as they went, the rats appeared to meander blindly through the maze. As the rats arrived at the top of the T, they often turned right, away from the chocolate. Even the rats that turned left toward the chocolate would often pause for no apparent reason. Eventually, most rats found the chocolate, but there was no discernible pattern in their meanderings. It was as if the rats were just walking around randomly.
The probes that were hooked up to the rats’ brains however, told a much different story; their brains were exploding with activity, especially at every sniff and scratch. They weren’t taking an unthinking stroll as it appeared, but rather were sorting through thousands of stimuli in their journey to the chocolate.
As the researchers repeated the experiment hundreds of times, a pattern started to emerge. The rats gradually quit making wrong turns and started finding the chocolate faster and faster, just as expected. However, when the researchers analyzed the brains of the rats again, they were surprised to see that the brain activity had not increased as expected but had actually decreased. As the maze became easier, the rats started thinking less and less. Their behavior had turned into a habit.
Our brains endlessly look for ways to save energy, to be more efficient. Thus, by developing habits our brain is allowed to transition into autopilot, freeing us to focus our attention on other things. Think how much mental energy it takes to drive a car when one first receives his or her driver’s license.
In the case of a quarterback, those “other things” can mean the difference between a touchdown pass and an interception.
If any football player needs spare processing power, it’s the quarterback. As he walks to the line of scrimmage, the sheer volume of stimuli that bombards the brain is near overwhelming: the fans and the defenders, the play call and snap count, the directing, predicting and executing of a play. It’s no wonder that senior quarterbacks fare better than freshman QBs. We all know this to be true and just chalk it up to experience. But going one level deeper, experience alone isn’t the key. What really matters is that experience turns into habit. Once a habit is formed, the brain is no longer forced to consciously think about just the cadence, but rather can notice the safety cheating up, the defense shifting into cover zero, the receiver who is one-on-one with the cornerback.
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In 2010 Mendenhall concluded that repetitions and experience were crucial for the success of a quarterback. Which makes me wonder: how much did the 2010 quarterback experience influence the 2012 quarterback decisions? Had Mendenhall replaced the experienced, yet injured Riley Nelson with Taysom Hill sooner (against Utah and/or Boise State), the Cougars might have another victory or two this season. After all, the inexperienced Hill, while playing against BSU, did what the experienced Nelson was unable to do — lead the team on a touchdown drive.
Such is the life of a coach. Just when one conclusion is drawn, the variables change, potentially rendering the old conclusion obsolete.
In conclusion, experience matters — a lot. Except when it doesn’t. After all this writing, I feel like a coach.
Nate Meikle is the sideline reporter for BYU football broadcasts on KSL Radio. Nate played wide receiver at BYU from 2004-2006 and is now in his third year of law school at Stanford. Twitter:@nate_meikle
