#AsForLax & a Personal View of Sports Psychology

Announcer Nikolai Busko called me out twice during Saturday afternoon’s broadcast of Army Lacrosse versus Lehigh. The first time was awesome. The second time, though, I felt bad about it.

A little surprised the BKs starters are still in. I wonder if they’re making a concerted effort to keep the score lopsided b/c of the rankings.

Lehigh scores again, & it’s 17-11.

I did not think the BKs would give up more than 10 today.#GoArmy #BEATLehigh #AsForLax

— Danno E. Cabeza (@DannoECabeza) March 16, 2024

It’s funny because I don’t think of myself as any kind of expert in a lot of sports and certainly not in reference to college lacrosse. But because of As For Football, folks sometimes take what I say seriously. That’s great a lot of the time, but at the point when it feels like what we say might start getting back to the coaches or especially the players, that’s where it makes me feel a little weird. 

I hope AFF improves the fan experience by reliving the glory of victories, by commiserating in defeat, and by occasionally giving folks specific things to look for during games via our preview articles. However, we’re also quite cognizant of the reality that the coaches know more than we do. We don’t want to be “Vinny from Long Island” yelling at the Jets coaches on a call-in radio show. It’s for this reason that I personally always feel weird about having the coaches on our shows, though they’ve invariably been very gracious about it when we’ve asked.

Friends, I am a swimmer. 

I did okay when it was my turn to do it, but even within that context, it’s been more than thirty years since the glory days. Swimming as a sport has moved on. Like, it is amazing how much it’s moved over the last three decades. And that’s from a sport I know well.

I swam butterfly, and more to the point, I specialized in the 200 Fly. It’s arguably the most psychologically intense race in the entire sport, which is how I got so deeply into sports psychology. 

Bottom line, the 200 Fly sucks. 

The 200 Fly sucks for everyone, even if you’re great at it like I was. The back half inevitably becomes a gut-check, such that being good at the race becomes a little like being good at poker. You want to get out fast but loose, dictate the tempo, and then force your opponent to go “all in” when you are ready and not when he is ready. In practice, this means getting to the halfway point right on the guy’s shoulder and then dropping the hammer just as you turn for that third fifty. 

At the halfway point, folks are just starting to feel it. Inevitably, in the back of his mind, your opponent is thinking, “Man, this sucks.” If then you hit a guy with a really good move at exactly the moment he’s starting to feel the fatigue of the race overall, well friends, you’ll break almost everyone every time. 

It’s simple human nature. When you hit a guy with a truly excellent move just as he himself is just starting to feel like shit, your opponent literally can’t help but think, “Wow. I’m up against a better swimmer.” I honestly couldn’t tell you how many races I’ve won like that, not just because I swam well but because the other guy broke mentally and actually swam badly. Far more than I ever lost, though.

If you’re wondering, this is the thing that makes my plebe year win at Army-Navy stick out so significantly. The Mids used this exact strategy on me -- and it worked! I spent the entire third fifty of that race feeling like I’d lost the race and trying to convince myself that it was okay because I was only a plebe. I just couldn’t do it, though. So I hung in there, and as we hit the fourth fifty, I decided that I was not gonna be able to live with it no matter what… 

This is how we got a relatively short swimming race where the lead changed hands three times. I’ve only ever seen that happen once, and *I* actually did it.

So yeah. I get way into the psychology of sports. 

I love it. It’s literally my favorite thing.

As a result, I find myself unconsciously dialed into body language between plays in football. I see the same kinds of things when I watch college lacrosse or even baseball. I feel like the experience of racing at a high level, of knowing what it feels like to fight through those truly tough times and come out the other side victorious, that helps inform a certain way of looking at this stuff.

I’m also an engineer who’s pretty good with understanding sports expectations through numbers. Any swimmer does a decent amount of this through the natural course of managing timed interval workouts over a series of years. Indeed, this is the core of what we do at As For Football. As I’ve said, we hope it informs the fan experience to have a sense of what “good” might look like on any given day or how the two “best” or “worst” parts of two given teams -- in terms of mathematical expectations -- might match-up on the field.

But. None of this gives us -- me in particular -- any particular insight into what teams or coaches should be doing. It doesn’t mean that we know how to analyze blockinng schemes or intend to present an opinion on when teams should switch from a man-defense to zone coverage. More to the point, if things don’t necessarily go as expected, like, that’s just a data point. It doesn’t necessarily mean that teams or players played well or badly.

This is how I felt about Army’s game against Lehigh. I expected to see a final score along the lines of maybe Army 12, Lehigh 8. I’d have put the Over/Under at something like 20 heading into the game itself. But instead we saw the Black Knights drop 18 and the Mountainhawks post 12, going WAY over my expectations for total offense. It struck me because these two teams have traditionally been defensive powerhouses, and even moreso when they’ve faced each other. Granted, Army has looked really good on offense this year. 

Lehigh, though, just played really good ball on Saturday.

You could actually see this in their body language. The Mountainhawks got down, but they never broke. They played aggressive, winning lacrosse all game long; it just so happened that they were never able to close the gap and get all the way back into it on the scoreboard. 

Still, good for them, honestly. Fighting hard in a losing effort like that is really hard to do.

Oh by the way, Army Lacrosse faces another really good team in Boston University this coming Saturday. Since we’re talking about sports psychology, here’s some. It is really, really hard to be consistently excellent across an entire season despite the fact that the better you are, the more people start gunning for you. Worse, the better you are, the more people want to tell you how great you are, and that’s actually poisonous to one’s focus and intensity. 

Speaking personally, I actually hate hearing how good I am. Like, I really hate it.

BU, though, *is* a really good team. Just as important will be how effectively the Black Knights are able to block out the noise associated with being ranked #1 in the nation and do what they do.

Happy Monday, friends. Have a good week.

Go Army! Beat Boston University!!!