“People are so prone to overcausation that you can make the reticent turn loquacious by dropping an occasional 'why?' in the conversation” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Why has BYU lost three games in a row to both Utah and Boise State? Why is BYU on a four-game losing skid against TCU? Why has BYU not had a player drafted by the NFL the last two seasons? The short answer for many is simple: Bronco Mendenhall.

But is that the correct answer?

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For hundreds of years, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. Period. Point blank. (To borrow three words from Adam “Pac-Man” Jones.) All-swans-were-white was an unassailable belief that seemed to be completely confirmed by empirical evidence. However, when the first explorers arrived in Australia in the early 1600s, they were met with a surprise: black swans.

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“[The story] illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.” So begins one of my favorite books, "The Black Swan," written by the Lebanese American scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Throughout the book, Taleb shows the reader that knowledge gained from observation has inherent limitations. Consider the life of a turkey that is fed every day by members of the human race. If the turkey looks to the past as an indication of what the future holds, it will conclude it is destined to a life of gluttony and ease, all thanks to the friendly humans. Yet on the day the turkey reaches maximum confidence in its future as a glutton, its head will be chopped off.

Drawing conclusions is a necessary part of life. We look at data. We analyze data. And we draw conclusions. Many of the conclusions we draw are habitual — when I get hungry I conclude that I need to eat. Yet, other conclusions we draw are fraught with error, especially when we draw conclusions based on limited information, too much information or only past experience ("I should go buy a home and take out a second mortgage because home prices always go up.") Humans are great at drawing conclusions — we’re not nearly as good at drawing the right conclusions, however.

One reason for this shortcoming is that we are incapable of storing and analyzing all the data we come across on a daily basis. In order to convey the message of 100,000 random words, we need to remember all 100,000 words. But, if those same 100,000 words are made up of just a single sentence repeated thousands of times, we can reduce the 100,000 words to just a few words and still retain the original message. Thus by finding a pattern, we are able to simplify the world around us. This desire to simplify is what Taleb refers to as the narrative fallacy: “our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths.” However, not all data can be reduced to simple explanations — especially when we are dealing with multiple variables.

Take the example of predicting the movements of billiard balls on a table (an example offered by Taleb). If you can make a few elementary calculations about a ball at rest, table resistance and the strength of the impact, predicting what would happen on the first hit is relatively simple. Predicting the second hit is doable, but more complicated. “The problem,” continues Taleb, “is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table. And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions!”

Our urge to explain past events is ever present. Give people 12 pairs of nylon stockings and ask them which ones they prefer and why, and the reasons given for their choices will be “texture, feel and color,” even when all of the stockings are the same.

Chip Heath, a business professor at Stanford and author of “Switch,” notes that only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. Twenty-five percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others. Ninety-four percent of college professors report doing above-average work. We can all draw conclusions — drawing the correct conclusion is the challenge.

Taleb concludes: “The next time you are asked to discuss world events, plead ignorance … casting doubt on the visibility of the immediate cause. You will be told that ‘you overanalyze,’ or that ‘you are too complicated.’ All you will be saying is that you don’t know!”

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Part of the fun in watching sports is playing arm-chair quarterback. The proliferation of sports-talk shows, blogs and even fantasy football is evidence of our desire to weigh in on what we see. This blog itself is an outlet for me to share my thoughts on BYU football. Which brings me back to the questions posed above: What is the reason for BYU’s struggles against Utah, BSU and TCU — the Cougars have lost 10 games in a row to those three teams — and why has a BYU player not been drafted in the last couple years?

First, the framing of the question probably narrows the scope of the conversation unfairly. See last week’s post for a broader picture of what coach Mendenhall has accomplished at BYU since 2005.

Secondly, for those who conclude that Mendenhall is the reason behind BYU’s struggles, I suggest you consider the following factors:

• The academic standards at BYU are at all-time highs. The average high school GPA for entering freshmen has increased from a 3.70 in 1997 to 3.81 in 2012. The average ACT score for incoming freshman has climbed above 28 (93rd percentile).

• The proliferation of social media, cell phones and Internet blogs has increased the visibility of players and their off-the-field behavior. Many of the players who successfully completed football careers at BYU in the past would likely not succeed in today’s environment.

• BYU turns over nearly 40 percent of its roster each year due to graduation and church missions, likely the highest percentage in the program's history.

• Stanford has proven it is possible to win at the highest level of college football even with high academic standards. However, Stanford does not have the same honor code as BYU. High academic standards combined with strict moral standards shrink the pool of eligible BYU athletes significantly.

• BYU has difficulty justifying the enormous salaries that are being paid to other schools' head coaches and assistant coaches alike. Some have wondered why BYU didn’t pursue Mike Leach as an offensive coordinator. Had BYU been willing to pay Leach $2 million this season, Leach would still have been taking a quarter-million dollar pay cut compared to what he is receiving at Washington State this year.

In sum, I don’t mean to imply that Mendenhall is infallible; the coach himself takes responsibility for all of the program’s shortcomings, including the injury to Taysom Hill last week. But given the vast number of variables that factor into the outcome of each game and the inherent limitations at BYU, I believe the appropriate answer to the questions posed above is: “It’s complicated.”

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